Veillées, Variants, and Violoneux: Generic boundaries and transnational trajectories in the traditional instrumental music of Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation uses tune variants to study the shifting musical boundaries of traditional instrumental music in Quebec, and traces citations of the rural veillée—one of the key extra-musical contexts for the genre of folk, or traditional, music in the province—in literature, on stage, on the radio, and on television. It is particularly concerned with the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the institutionalization of folklore studies and the commercialization of recorded sound redefined folk music in many parts of North America, Quebec included. The emphasis in this dissertation on genre—understood as the processes of repetition and variation that shape and reshape both musical content and extra-musical contexts—aligns with a growing concern within music research.Chapter One provides an overview of traditional instrumental music in Quebec and situates this dissertation within scholarly conversations on melodic variants and musical diffusion; on meanings, usages, and historiography of the term "tradition"; on musical genres and generic boundaries; and on the circulation of musical materials. Chapter Two draws on Brackett's theory of citationality to explore how early-twentieth-century folklorists used the veillée to define the boundaries of a new genre, folklore, that encompassed not only the language-based arts of song and storytelling, but also fiddle tunes, group social dancing, and step-dancing. Chapter Three investigates small-scale networks of people, commercial recordings, and fiddle tunes in Montreal in the 1920s, and argues that high demand for recorded fiddle music spurred a wave of new composition in those years. Chapter Four proposes a new approach to analyzing multiple settings of the same melody via an exhaustive study of the tune "Money Musk," and suggests that musicians conceive of traditional tunes as sets of musical possibilities tied to a melodic "essence." This chapter also positions traditional instrumental music in Quebec within a transnational network of dance and dance music extending from the British Isles to North America. Chapter Five contrasts the generic framing of folklore on the popular television show "Soirée canadienne" with that of earlier staged and unstaged veillées. This chapter explores written and embodied modes of expression in traditional music in Quebec, and engages with ideas of authenticity and kitsch.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".