A Nova Scotia Gaelic Milling Frolic
Ever since I wrote a blog post on the “Top Ten Differences between Gaelic in Nova Scotia and Scotland” I’ve been wanting to write a longer post about milling frolics.
I gave a brief description of milling frolics in the previous blog post:
A milling frolic is a social event that was born of necessity, and is carried on today for enjoyment. After wool cloth is woven on a loom, it is necessary to shrink the cloth in order to make it warmer and more watertight. In the Scottish Highlands [in pre-industrial times], cleansing and shrinking the newly-woven cloth was done by hand in local communities. It was a social event of shared labour, made enjoyable by singing songs which maintained the work rhythm, preserved traditions, and encouraged original compositions with jokes about local events and personalities.
Nowadays the real milling is done in factories, but the milling frolic has continued as a social event in Nova Scotia Gaelic communities. This contrasts with Scotland, where you might see a milling frolic performed on a stage or as a historical re-enactment, but not as a social event in the village or church hall.
Milling frolics involve special work songs which are known as “milling songs” in Nova Scotia (and “waulking songs” in Scotland). Some milling songs are shared with Gaelic Scotland, but quite a few were indigenously composed in Nova Scotia. There is a good but short collection of these songs on a Memorial University folklore website.
Milling frolics take place at least a couple of times a year in Halifax, but not always where you might expect! This one was at NSCAD University, the art school in Halifax. In November 2014, a NSCAD textiles instructor organized a milling frolic with the help of Mary MacLean who formerly ran the Halifax milling group An Cliath Clis.
The instructor and textile artist Jennifer Green had her students weave a length of wool cloth. The object was to “mill” (or full) the cloth in this traditional manner, so the textile students could have the cultural experience of how this was done by the Scottish Gaelic ancestors of many Nova Scotians.
Wool cloth woven by NSCAD textile students
The cloth had been sewn together to form a large loop. The students sat at the milling table, along with various members of the Nova Scotia Gaelic community who came to help with the demonstration. (This event was held in an auditorium to make it easier for some people to watch even if they were not able to participate.)
Mary started by pouring water on the cloth to wet it. The moisture, along with the friction and heat generated by grabbing, pounding, and rubbing the cloth on the table, all cause the wool fabric to shrink as desired. Wetting the cloth also has the useful effect of reducing the amount of fibers that fly into the air during the milling frolic (although the odds are that you’ll still end up with fibers up your nose!).
Everyone sitting around the table grabs the cloth and hits it against the table in a kind of dragging/pushing motion. Here are a couple of how-to videos about the rhythm that I made last year in the temporary “Gaels of Nova Scotia” exhibit at the Nova Scotia Museum of Natural History.
In part 2, we apply the milling rhythm to the chorus of a milling song:
You can see how the milling rhythm works with a group of people in this video from the NSCAD frolic. People make a few mistakes but the overall rhythm is clear and in fact the singer explains it at the beginning of the video: “Mine – Yours – Mine – Pass.” Everyone passes to their left, and the cloth travels around the table clockwise (deiseal in Gaelic).
Different milling songs are sung during the event. One person will decide which song to sing, and start off with the chorus which signals to everyone which song it is. The leader will then sing the verses, with everyone at the table joining in on the chorus. Once that song is done, the leader may continue with another song, or let someone else take the lead and pick the next song.
Mary provided the words so that the textile students, who had not studied Gaelic, could join in more easily on the chorus of each song:
Here is a short clip of Mary singing “Seinn O”:
Periodically the cloth was measured to see how much it had shrunk.
I had to leave the event before the final measurement but as you can see it was definitely shrinking!
The cloth is shrinking!
Shrinking the wool cloth makes it warmer and more water resistant. These days, though, unless you are a felter, quilter, or other kind of textile artist, it’s hard to imagine wanting to shrink fabric on purpose. Too bad it happens by accident all too often with a favourite wool sweater…
If you’ve never had the chance to participate in a milling frolic, I hope you get the chance soon. As I’ve said before, participating in a milling frolic is a great motivation for learning Gaelic songs, and a great way to meet other Gaelic speakers and enjoy Gaelic culture.
Milling the cloth at NSCAD
As a former music teacher I noticed immediately that this tune is in the pentatonic scale and uses syncopation rhythm. These two things are the foundations of blues music. I have often thought that the plantation workers in the deep south of North America, who invented the blues, can’t have just brought blues music over from Africa – african music is too dissimilar. Nor do most of the popular anglo-american folk styles of the 19th century fit (e.g. ballads, sea shanties, jigs). Perhaps they were singing irish and scottish gaelic worker’s songs like this, presumably translated into english.
Emily asked me if I would comment as an ethnomusicologist who specializes in Gaelic song. My husband is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in North American popular musics. We enjoyed discussing your comment! I have to admit that I don’t hear milling songs as syncopated. I wonder if you’re hearing the “short-long” (usually sixteenth-dotted-eighth) rhythms as syncopations? This rhythm is very common in Gaelic song probably because vowel length is significant to meaning in the Gaelic language. At the same time, in Gaelic, the emphasis is almost always on the first syllable. So we get these “short-long” rhythms where we have a short first vowel in a word. But the accent is still on the beat — it just doesn’t get a long rhythmic duration.
As for your hypothesis about the blues (especially the pentatonic scale) originating with Gaelic song, well, it’s possible, but it’s difficult to test. Many cultures have music built on pentatonic scales — it’s one of the most common scales globally — and there are many African melodic traditions as well as rhythmic ones. I’m afraid that I don’t know them well enough to be able to say anything about their scale systems, though. It’s certainly true that many African musical traditions — both in Africa and in the North American, Caribbean and South American diasporas — have evolved to blend European and African elements. At the same time, my understanding is that while there are a fair number of descriptions of slaves and their music, the emphasis tends to be on how different their music was from their masters’ music, which suggests that they did indeed have a distinct musical style. Having said that, I have heard it suggested that the African-American Baptist practice of “lining out” hymns may have come from the very similar Gaelic psalm-singing tradition, although I don’t think there’s any proof. I’ve also heard that some slaves spoke Gaelic. But I don’t think that Gaels were ever strongly enough represented among the American slave-owning population to believe it likely that Gaelic melodies, scale systems, or other musical traits became dominant among slaves and their music-making.
In other words, while it’s quite normal for musics to change and evolve when people come into contact with new or different musical traditions, I’m a hesitant to embrace the idea that the African-American blues evolved from Gaelic song traditions. However, I also can’t offer you definitive proof that they didn’t. Sorry to be so wishy-washy (welcome to the world of academics)!
Wonderful, thanks Heather. A point of clarification: I was probably using the term “syncopation” too loosely, but I WAS hearing the accent on the off beats – like dum BAH dum BAH, dum BAH dum BAH. Altho that’s exagerating it. It’s more accurate to say that even equal weight given to the off beats seems so at odds with the most popular folk styles in the Anglo-american world of the 19th century.