I’d access the case files of Rockwood’s inmates through the Archives of Ontario, throw on the white gloves, then flip through the brittle pages, reading the intake forms and ledgers, superintendents’ diaries, reports to the Dominion of Canada, inspectors’ memoranda, etc. Our process of retroactive reconstruction is similar, with marked differences to deal with the inaccessibility of the inmates at Rockwood due to the temporal rift of 150 years. He then made recordings of himself playing them for release on Folkways Records, accompanied by deeply detailed liner notes describing the origins of the songs. In 1950–51, Clayton travelled to Britain, collecting broadsides of traditional ballads. Less popular was the methodology of ethnomusicologists like Paul Clayton. Simone Carver: Most folk listeners are familiar with song collection by way of field recordings, like Alan Lomax’s recordings of Muddy Waters. How did you go about collecting these songs from Rockwood? They’re landlines for those of us communing with something indecipherable to our cohabitants. Songwriting is a refuge for those overactive and musically compelled minds dealing with trauma and crisis. So, your proposal to broaden the scope of those voices was welcome.
While I deeply value the traditionalists’ approach to preserving song, I do not personally feel that these are emancipatory visions to repeat constantly. I love the genre, its melody and form, but often feel the songs sung from women’s perspectives occupy a narrow subject matter: woman as murder victim, woman as devil, woman wed to the devil. An excerpt from their conversation about the process is transcribed below.įiver: When you approached me to arrange these Audible Songs from Rockwood, I was compelled by the possibility of new narrative voices in traditional North American folk music. It compiles imagined songs from women held at Rockwood between 18. The criminally insane included people who pleaded insanity at their trials, and convicts who had become insane while imprisoned.Īudible Songs from Rockwood, released April 21, is a collaboration between real musician Fiver and invented song collector Simone Carver. Built over nine years by penitentiary labourers, it was first established, in 1856, to house a class of criminal that disturbed the social order of both asylums and penitentiaries. In 1859, construction of the Rockwood Asylum for the criminally insane began in Portsmouth, just west of the Kingston Penitentiary, in what is now known as Eastern Ontario.
0 kommentar(er)
