The eight year old, Claire, seems to have the ability to learn a tune and remember it. The six year old Julia is a firecracker, he mother says. Her four year old son Alec (named after her father Alexander) has started lessons. One of the proudest discoveries in my life was to see how she loves the fiddle.” She cries when we try to take it away from her. However, “she has taken a liking to the fiddle. Sadie, who has Down Syndrome, has broken three of them, because they are fragile and she’s three. MacMaster is teaching her children from three year old Sadie who plays a 16th-size fiddle. It’s stood 1,000 years of testing.”Īnd if the Leahy-MacMaster children have anything to do with it, there’s another generation of players on the way. “It’ll never go out of style, I can’t imagine it. 25 and 26 and they hope to make it an annual event.Ĭeltic music has slipped a bit in prominence, certainly from the days of Riverdance when the sounds of Irish and Scottish music was ringing worldwide.īut MacMaster isn’t worried about its demise. They have even found the time to start a Celtic music festival called the Greenbridge Celtic Folk Festival. The couple have settled near Peterborough, Ontario. “I am not interested in going to Europe any more.” She is still doing about 100 shows a year either by herself or with Donnell, but she’s sticking to North America. I want to cram in as much living and playing as I can.” “Now I realize how precious it is. I realize I am on a time limit here. That’s 20 years ago now and I haven’t felt that way since. I was really travelling making three trips across the Atlantic in a week. “In my 20s I was touring and doing too many shows. The instrument has been such a part of her life one wondered if there was ever a time when she has grown tired of it. I wrote them down in my early teens and I’ll never forget them.” I’ll write the first few bars of each one down on a piece of paper. I have books and books where I have written down a few bars of tunes. “I use it to write down music and to remember music. I was looking at those black dots on a page and I thought my eyes were going to pop out of my head. But I learned and I’m grateful. “In my teens, my parents would bring me to another uncle of mine Kinnon Beaton. Music lessons included learning to read music, something that she says she was impatient with. But her own aptitude led to lessons and a career that blossomed in the 1990s.

She, of course, was surrounded by musicians and music, especially her famous uncle Buddy MacMaster. I don’t remember having a profound thought. I started and when I look back now I can say that it was easy for me to pick it up.” “When I saw it I really took a liking to it. I just remember looking at it and it hit my heart. That happened when an uncle in Boston, Mass., shipped up a three-quarter-sized instrument up for the MacMaster children to use. She was nine and a half when she picked one up. In her family home there were fiddles but they were all full-sized instruments “so I wasn’t big enough to play one until then.” My ancestors came from the Isle of Eigg.” The music came over from Scotland in the mid-1700s. “All fiddlers will have a story to tell about why they are holding the instrument in their hands and where it came from. MacMaster’s own family landed in Cape Breton in the 1700s. The roots of fiddle music in Canada begins with the arrival of Europeans in this country. The Ottawa show features performers from across Canada including: Karrnnel Sawitsky and his band The Fretless, the Ottawa Valley’s April Verch, Métis fiddler John Arcand, the Northwest Territories’ Wesley Hardisty and Cynthia MacLeod from P.E.I. But MacMaster and husband Donnell Leahy seem to manage a musical career and raising a family pretty darn well. “It was just a little misunderstanding. Someone had turned the stove off.” It’s the kind of thing that can happen when you have six kids aged three to 11. One is cleaning the tub and the other is folding laundry and all of sudden my husband said supper is ready and I’m thinking there is no way those sausages are cooked and I had to go down and make sure and sure enough they weren’t cooked. “All the kids were nicely working on chores. But when ARTSFILE reached her recently, she wasn’t only thinking about music. She was also concerned with family matters. That’s why, she says, she is excited to play in a Canada Scene concert with other proponents of fiddle music on Saturday July 8.

Natalie MacMaster has been travelling across Canada for a couple of decades now and she knows how strongly connected the country is to the fiddle.

Natilie macmaster