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Leah Roseman: Hey welcome, Alexis Chartrand. Amazing fiddler and innovator. Thanks so much for joining me today.
Alexis Chartrand:
Thank you for having me.
Leah Roseman:
So you're in Montreal?
Alexis Chartrand:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Leah Roseman:
And I know you're going to play some music for us today. Do you want to start with a tune?
Alexis Chartrand:
Oh. Yeah I could. Yeah. Could play a little Quebec jig from the repertoire of Joseph Allard. Joseph Allard was a fiddler who was born in the end of the 19th century, and he lived until the mid 20th century. And he was known as the prince of fiddlers, and he also was the first teacher of Jean Carignan. So his musical legacy has been quite important. So yeah, a little jig. (fiddle music)
Leah Roseman:
Beautiful. That was just gorgeous. I was just thinking about the fact that of course you're playing with a mic, and you perform with a mic.
Alexis Chartrand:
Often, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. So back in the day of course, people were playing in kitchens, but they would have big dances for the community, and they'd have to crank it out. It must have changed people's playing to be able to do more subtle things as they had amplification, do you think?
Alexis Chartrand:
I think the question of amplification does have a fair bit of impact on the playing. My playing is not always amplified, and I like to be able to do both, and it's something that I really try to make a part of my practice not to leave either out of it. And so I do adapt my playing for whether I'm playing acoustically, in a bigger hall or in a smaller hall, or whether I'm playing with a microphone and a PA in a bigger space or in a smaller space. And I think both setups are interesting for different reasons, and I like to be sensitive and mindful of that fact.
Alexis Chartrand:
Regarding playing the playing of older Quebec fiddlers, they didn't necessarily have access to amplification, especially in the earlier part of the 20th century. But it became something quite normal pretty early during the revival as some of these fiddlers were starting to be showcased in events, in festivals, in different settings. And if we're talking about dance music, then often the communities that gathered to dance, it wasn't hundreds of people, and so it was possible for a fiddler or a small ensemble to drive the dance forward with acoustic instruments. And that's how it was really done in those communities for many decades.
Leah Roseman:
So let's talk about dance. It's a big part of your life.
Alexis Chartrand:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). I grew up in a family of dancers. My mom, Anne-Marie Gardette is a specialist of baroque dance. She participated in the recreation of those dances in France in the 80s, notably with Ris et Danceries, Francine Lancelot. So people who did some research in how to find ways to recreate what was basically the direct ancestor of ballet. And my dad, Pierre Chartrand, is a step dancer, Quebecois step dancer, a caller, so someone who does a half speaking, half singing to explain the dance, and that's an American tradition that arrived in Quebec in the 20s or 30s.
Alexis Chartrand:
And they both also are dance researchers, so they've done some historical research, ethnological research on baroque dance, on the dance that was danced in Nouvelle-France. So in the early French colony, on what is now the Quebec and Maritime territories. And my dad also has done a lot of ethnological studies on the social and solo dancing mostly in Quebec, but also in The Maritimes and a little bit in Ontario.
Leah Roseman:
So would that be a tradition that was carried down just by showing people? Because with baroque I know things were actually written down, there's written descriptions.
Alexis Chartrand:
Baroque dance in France, there's the notation Beauchamp–Feuillet, so there are scores for those dances. And my mom learned to decipher those things, and she can recreate choreographies that were notated that way. So that's a big part of the work of contemporary baroque dancers. For the traditional dance, it's based more on collecting. There are some written sources, because people have been taking note of what was danced during dance evenings or during social events for a very long time. But the practice, the actual movements of the step dancing, the actual movements of the social dancing, the quadrille square dances, cotillions, the contredanse, we had living sources of these things. And people like Simone Boyer or Norman Legault were pioneers in Quebec, of going and meeting those people who still knew those dances, and filming, learning those dances, and transmitting that knowledge and that practice through the new generations.
Leah Roseman:
So often when you play, you use your feet as percussion. I think in English, do we call that clogging?
Alexis Chartrand:
Clogging is more of a word that we use in England, and it references English step dancing.
Leah Roseman:
Okay.
Alexis Chartrand:
So what we call foot tapping or foot percussion, is quite specific to francophone traditional music, mostly in Eastern Canada. So Quebec, little bit of Ontario, and in the Maritimes. In parts of Rhode Island they even call it "la gigue assise" they have some little choreographies that can do while sitting down. It's its origins are unclear, there's not a lot of very specific research. The earliest written sources of it, I think, are from the early 20th century. But really, it's something that really most fiddlers from just before the first half of the 20th century I think, were doing in Quebec. So the Quebecois fiddlers, the ones we all know now is like Carignan foot tap and the Boudreau foot tap. So all of these people were self accompanying with their feet, and it's become a staple, an identifying staple of Quebecois traditional music. And it's become deeply associated with the image of Quebecois traditional music, both locally and internationally. And it's something that almost every fiddler I know, at least has learned how to do. And whether they do it on stage or often, depends on their preferences.
Leah Roseman:
So you have an incredible groove when you're playing, and flexibility. When you were learning to do the foot percussion with playing, was it hard to coordinate when you were a kid?
Alexis Chartrand:
I think if we're talking about groove, in my mind it has more to do with dance than it has to do with foot tapping. The interesting thing about a practice of music that has very deep with another practice, like dance, could be something else but in that case it's dance, is that it really reframes the way we think of what our priorities are. And for me growing up... So I was studying classical music here in Montreal, but I was also accompanying my dad's the step dancing classes, and sometimes social dancing. And something I quickly realized was that, the utmost priority of my playing needed to be, will it drive and inspire dancers? Are they going to have fun, are they going to want dance, are they going to enjoy that?
Alexis Chartrand:
And without even going into the technical necessities of that goal, you get a pretty strong and immediate feeling of whether you're doing good or not. And then especially contrasting that with a more academic learning experience in classical music, it's a very, very interesting, and to my mind, healthy way of reframing what we need to think about and prioritize when we're playing.
Alexis Chartrand:
And then once we've understood that was the goal, then we can start learning. I learned a lot from step dancers, listening to the sound of their feet, to the inherent groove that they've developed. To me that's really the basis of my practice of the bow, all of the rhythms that we have to summon with the traditional style of bowing. Personally is deeply, deeply related to the practice of step dancing in Quebec.
Leah Roseman:
So in the description of this conversation, there'll be links to your albums and lots of things, so people can hear the footwork. Are you set up now with the board? Could you play-
Alexis Chartrand:
No, not right now.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah. Yeah. I didn't figure. But you do have another instrument by your side.
Alexis Chartrand:
Yeah. I took out the baroque violin that is being lent to me by a very nice friend and colleague, Alex Keeler, from the eastern townships. And that's been part of my practice for a few years now, I've been exploring the idea of adapting traditional Quebecois music for a historical instrument. It's something that hasn't been done a lot in Quebec, I know of some musicians in Quebec City, baroque musicians who've played a little bit of Quebecois music, there's some baroque violinists in Montreal that have done a little bit of that. And obviously if we look outside of Quebec, people like David Greenberg have done an amazing, really amazingly inspiring work on the connection between baroque violin and fiddling.
Alexis Chartrand:
But not a lot of it has been done specifically with the Quebecois repertoire. And so I've been very interested in trying to make that happen, while keeping in mind that is intrinsically anachronistic, because the sources we have for Quebecois fiddling are way too recent for them to have been linked with historical instruments. And the style of playing of Quebecois fiddlers, they're deeply indebted to the modern violin, the modern construction of the violin, but especially the modern construction of the bow.
Alexis Chartrand:
And obviously, people who are familiar with the way bows are made will recognize some of the characteristics of a modern bow, with its quite long length, it's pretty intricate frog here, it has some garnishes, and it has a screw that allows for making the hair more or less tense. Which are all things that I do not have on the baroque bow I use, it's a very primitive style of bow, it's much shorter, it fits on the whole screen right now. It has pretty much nothing on the frog, it doesn't have a screw, it's a little piece of wood that just clips in place. And I use a little piece of, I think this is leather, to decide how much tension I use.
Alexis Chartrand:
And it's bent differently, so it reacts deeply differently. I think a big part of my work on the instrument has been trying to find ways to adapt techniques that have been developed on the modern bow, and try to adapt them to an instrument that is anachronistic. And then the other part of it has been just taking advantage of the gut strings, which have a very, very nice, rich, dark tone that I personally find very, very appealing. But that is maybe less evidently usable in the context of Quebecois traditional music, which is often very driven, very powerful, and very intense.
Leah Roseman:
You've done some interesting collaborations where you've played baroque violin with modern at the same time, for that tempo. So then you're tuning to our standard modern tuning?
Alexis Chartrand:
It's interesting that you've mentioned that, because I'm currently working on these ideas with my colleague and friend, Nicolas Babineau. We've been working together for almost five years now, and we released already two albums, one in 2017, one in 2019, both of which I only played modern violin on. But last year, throughout my research and my work on the baroque instrument, and I was talking about it with Nico, and we realized that we were both very excited to try to bring the possibilities of that instrument into the music of our duo, and so we started doing that. And we're currently working on a project to create a concert that will be presented in a few festivals this summer at Mémoire racines in Joliette, in late August...no late July, and in late August in Beaumont for Esprit de souche , organized by Marée Music.
Alexis Chartrand:
We'll also be at Concerts des îles du Bic for a conference and discussion around that subject of playing traditional music on the baroque instrument. And indeed we are doing a lot of work in trying to bring together Nicola's modern violin, and my playing of the baroque instrument. And it's brought up a lot of very interesting questions of how to bring together those two worlds that seem sometimes a little bit incompatible. And what's happened is, you were mentioning tuning, so I tune the baroque violin a whole step down. So historically it would've been a, an early French tuning. So at A 392 instead of A 440,
Leah Roseman:
Ah, okay.
Alexis Chartrand:
You know, for me, it's very useful because it's exactly a whole tone lower than the modern instruments. So when I've worked with Lévy Bourbonnais on harmonica, I was just, I was playing, we could play together and it could work perfectly.
Alexis Chartrand:
So we do some of that with Nico, but Nico is also using a lot of cross tuning on his violin. And so what ends up happening is that, his modern violin is not tuned at all in a standard way, and the baroque violin is tuned usually in a standard way, there's a little bit of cross tuning, but less so. I find it less comfortable to retune the gut strings, they're a little more sensitive than the modern violin strings.
Alexis Chartrand:
But yeah, a big part of the show right now. So my baroque violin is tuned so from top to bottom it would be D,G,C,F, and Nicolas's fiddle, from top to bottom would be, F,A,D,F. So a open D minor, and he's been figuring out how to use that at tuning. And he switches a little bit, sometimes he plays an E,A,D,E too. And sometimes I tune up the low F string up to a G to get a traditional tuning that we call "grondeuse" in Quebec.
Leah Roseman:
Yeah, I played baroque violin for quite a few years, its mostly chamber music. And Biber wrote quite a few scordatura with really cool tunings. That'd be something to try.
Alexis Chartrand:
Yeah. Cross tuning is a very important part of most fiddle traditions across Northern America. Old time fiddlers cross tuned a lot, Acadian fiddlers, Quebecois fiddlers, Métis fiddlers from The Prairies. It's really a great way to explore a slightly different feeling on the instrument, and explore different possibilities it creates often, like interesting resonances, it allows for different harmonic ideas.
Alexis Chartrand:
In Quebec there's a lot of very active fiddlers who love cross tuning to accompany songs. So people like Lisa Ornstein or Pascal Gemme, they love to try very experimental tunings that allow them to play chords that will accompany beautifully traditional singing. So it's a very, very interesting tool and a very useful one.
Leah Roseman:
So can we hear a bit of your baroque violin, can you play tune?
Alexis Chartrand:
Sure. Let's see. I think I'll play a little reel called Reel du Granpère. It's a tune that I've played for many years on the modern violin, and can be heard at the very beginning of the first album with Nicola. And I find it interesting to hear the very huge difference in timbre that we get with the gut strings, and the possibilities that this bow gives us with it. So here, the Reel du Granpère. (fiddle music)
Leah Roseman:
Oh, so beautiful.
Alexis Chartrand:
Thank you. Thank you.
Leah Roseman:
So there's so much ornamentation in both hands, it strikes me. And of course in baroque times, people were really gifted at improvisation and just all kinds of ornaments, so there's that parallel.
Alexis Chartrand:
Yeah, indeed. Ornamentation is a very, very important part of both baroque violin playing, and contemporary fiddling, yeah.
Leah Roseman:
So are there names for all the different bow things when you teach it?
Alexis Chartrand:
So the thing with naming, and categorizing, and classifying playing is that, it is not a worry of everyone. And it is often a requirement in academic types of music, people who want to create a syllabus maybe, or a program, or maybe a handbook of ornamentation or fiddle playing or something. They have an incentive to name and describe and categorize things. Some fiddlers love to do that, some don't really care for it.
Alexis Chartrand:
Indeed, in my teaching I often have to decide on a name for things, so that maybe I can reference it to my students. And I'd say that in traditional music there is no overarching authority, and so everyone comes up with their own names for things, or maybe just with whatever name they heard someone else mention, so there's a lot of variety in what words people are going to use. But if we listen to the actual techniques, and if we pay attention to what people are actually playing, then we see a lot of commonalities. And there are ornaments specific to Ireland, to Scotland, to old time music, to Acadian music, to Quebecois music, to Ontarian music, to Métis music.
Alexis Chartrand:
And personally, I've mostly been studying and learning Quebecois ornamentation and Irish ornamentation, that's where my personal preferences went to. But Scottish ornamentation is very, very rich, Cape Breton ornamentation is very, very interesting, and there's really a wealth of knowledge and ideas that we can find just by listening to what other people do. And stealing an ornament after another, and sometimes coming up with our own personal ways of using those ornaments.
Alexis Chartrand:
But if there's one thing that I find very important to remember regarding ornamentation is that, especially in certain forms of academic music, we tend to see ornamentation as the seasoning that gets sprinkled on top of a melody, and what we realize when we dive deep into traditional music, and I think it's probably true of baroque music, I'm not an expert in there, but what we realize is that ornamentation is structuring, it structures the phrasing, it structures the bowing, you cannot actually take it away, you cannot take it out of the music. If you do, you get something that to most ears will sound compromised in a way or another. But what's interesting is that, you need ornamentation, but you don't need any specific ornamentation. Some fiddlers will never learn some of the ornaments that every other fiddlers know how to do.
Alexis Chartrand:
And some fiddlers will have a few very specific ornaments they do very well and stick to those one, and some fiddlers will be going around learning every ornament they can find. And so it's not really necessarily about learning the right ornaments, as much as it being an integral part of the phrasing and of the practice of that music.
Alexis Chartrand:
And so I often warn my students about leaving it for the end, leaving it for later. I think it's important to take it into account as soon as we start getting interested in a tune, or in a whole style of traditional playing.
Leah Roseoman:
And when you tour, I imagine you must collect tunes a little bit? Different...
Alexis Chartrand:
Ah, that's a good question. I've never felt like I was someone who learned a lot of tunes, I know I tend to fall in love with tunes and carry them for years and years, and really squeeze as much music as I can out of them. Which is why currently, with Nicolas, we are working only on repertoire that we've already recorded, but we've changed the instrumentation, we've changed the arrangements.
Alexis Chartrand:
We find tunes in all sorts of places, but there's no bad place. So sometimes it's tunes we've heard on a CD, tunes we've heard online tunes, we've heard on a documentary, tunes we've heard in person, someone recording it for us, or tunes we've sought out, we've heard someone play something and we've been like, "Where can I find that, can you record it for me?"
Alexis Chartrand:
I tend to believe that the most important thing is not necessarily where a tune is found, it's really what we do with it afterwards. And what I like about traditional music is specifically that, an oral tradition depends largely on people passing down melodies, and very often without any recorded or written medium, which means that the two needs to have stayed alive in their head for at least long enough for someone else to be able to learn it. And so for me, there's something very interesting in the idea that when, when we get access to that repertoire, we know that it's been interesting enough to someone, probably to a few people, to be carried through a few fiddlers and a few generations.
Alexis Chartrand:
And when then we fall in love with that tune, for whatever reason and wherever we found it, that's enough for me to want to play it, and to want to perform it and share it with other people.
Leah Roseman:
I have a question about your training as a classical violinist, because you did quite a bit of that I'm sure when you were a teen. You went to an arts high school.
Alexis Chartrand:
Yeah. So I started learning violin in private lessons with a violinist in Montreal named Diane Plante who also played baroque violin, even though I never studied that with her, but it was always around, I knew about those things from a very early age, I started around age of seven, I think. And so I did about five, six years of that, and then I went to Joseph-François-Perrault, so it's a high school, music high school, in quartier Saint-Michel in Montreal. Public school that built its music program from the ground up from, I think the 70s or 80s, and it's now I think one of the biggest music programs in high school in Canada.
Alexis Chartrand:
And there I played in string ensembles, I played in symphony orchestras, and I sang in the choir. But mostly I really, really I discovered and fell in love with a lot of classical and romantic music. And that was really, for me... We listened to a little bit of classical music, some Bach Partitas at home, but I didn't know about a lot of the late classical and romantic music, and discovering Beethoven, discovering Mahler, discovering a lot of Honegger, a lot of amazing composers, became a really, really, really important part of the music I wanted to listen to and to engage with.
Alexis Chartrand:
And after that I went to Saint-Laurent de Cégep in Montreal, and I was quite lucky to end up in a composition program there, and I discovered a contemporary music and electroacoustic music under the tutelage of an amazing, amazing man called Michel Tétrault who's been teaching composition almost single handedly in that program for a few decades now. Yeah.
Alexis Chartrand:
And in Cégep I didn't play violin anymore. So basically, I did 10 years of classical violin, I did traditional music throughout, but on my own, and with the people I knew because of my upbringing. But I'd say that discovering the music was as... It was more important to me actually, in hindsight, then necessarily performing it, I think. Because I think the choral repertoire that I sang, even though I didn't sing it very well, had a tremendous impact on my music making. And so that was a very, very important part of learning music for me.
Leah Roseman:
Thank you so much for coming today. And I'm just wondering if you could leave us with a ballad.
Alexis Chartrand:
Yeah. That's an interesting thing, that's something I've been working on for I think probably 10 years now, the traditional music in Quebec is often associated with high energy dance music. At the end of my teenage years, I was longing for some slower paced music, and part of it was just taking maybe dance tunes and slowing them down a little bit, and changing their mood. But something I also started doing was playing song melodies on the violin, which is something that is very, very common in Ireland, for example, but it's not done a lot in Quebec. It does exist, I didn't invent that, but it's not part of the common practice of fiddlers right now. And that's something I've been very in interested in for the past 10 years.
Alexis Chartrand:
And it happened been to really, really coincide well with my interest in the baroque violin, because the kind of phrasing we can do with the baroque bow, the kind of tone we can get from the gut string, lent itself so, so nicely and naturally to some of these slow songs that I've been carrying for a few years now.
Alexis Chartrand:
So yeah, I could play a little complainte, so a traditional melody that stripped of its words. But I feel like there's an interesting depth and subtlety in how much singers put in those melodies that could seem over simplistic to certain people at first glance. And I think that maybe some of the narration, the narrative component of these song melodies, gets distilled in the notes that are left when you take the words away. So yeah, we can try that. (fiddle music)
Leah Roseman:
Wow. Thank you so much Alexis.
Alexis Chartrand:
Thank you for having me.
