Tuesday's Folklore Photo (on a Wednesday!)

On a recent trip to South River, I had the pleasure of meeting Beauty. Beauty is a 31 year old Newfoundland Pony who is now retired and living the easy life with her pony friend, Kula. 

After meeting Beauty, I came across this image hung up in a barn belonging to another pony owner. Pulling the cart in this image is Beauty in her heyday. 

Indonesian instrument naming ceremony this Thursday

By Mandy Cook
Memorial’s School of Music will unveil the latest addition to its suite of instruments at a special event at the St. John’s Arts and Culture Centre.

Music lovers will be treated to the debut concert of the school’s new gamelan and a special naming ceremony for the set of Indonesian instruments on Thursday, March 21, from 4-5 p.m. on the centre’s upper concourse. The gamelan will be housed in the school’s Research Centre for the Study of Music, Media and Place, located in the Arts and Culture Centre.

It is Indonesian tradition to give a new gamelan its own special name through a ceremony called a selametan (“thanksgiving”). The ceremony involves sacred songs and special offerings of food (especially nasi Tumpeng – rice with saffron, drinks, fruits, and incense. Master gamelan artist Ade Suparman, who hails from West Java, will lead the ceremony and perform with gamelan expert and Evergreen State College instructor Dr. Sean Williams. Mr. Suparman is a specialist on kecapi (a stringed zither), and Dr. Williams is a suling (flute) player and vocalist.

The event will also be the debut of the MUN Gamelan Ensemble under director Bill Brennan, who is also a member of the Toronto-based Evergreen Club Gamelan. The student ensemble has been working together since January and has benefited from recent workshops with Mr. Suparman.

“The School of Music has been the recipient of a generous donation from the estate of Rita Love that has enabled us to complete our prestige string quartet, to establish a student scholarship and to commission an Indonesian gamelan degung,” said Dr. Ellen Waterman, dean, School of Music. “We are grateful to Derrick Hutchens, the executor of the Love estate, for his work in realizing these projects.”

A gamelan is a set of keyed metallaphones, similar to xylophones, and gongs found in Indonesian classical music. The various instruments are all made to order by a master artisan and are meant to be used together only in that particular gamelan. The School of Music’s gamelan was crafted by 75-year-old Tentrem Sarwanto, a renowned Javanese gongsmith who has supplied gamelans to several major universities in Europe and North America.

There are several different varieties of gamelan -- Javanese, Balinese, Sundanese – depending on what part of Indonesia they come from. Sundanese gamelan, or gamelan degung, the gamelan the School of Music has chosen, also includes double-headed drums, a bamboo flute (suling) and a zither (kecapi).

“Gamelan music is magical and exotic sounding,” said Dr. Waterman. “Interlocking layers of delicate bell-like sounds are interwoven with complex drum rhythms. Typically, these beautiful bronze instruments are housed in carved teak frames. Ours features gilded dragons! Up to 16 players sit cross-legged on low cushions to play the gamelan.”

Gamelan is particularly useful as the in-house world music ensemble at the School of Music, says Dr. Waterman, because it is a rhythm-based group activity that doesn’t rely on particular instrumental skills in order to play – any good musician can become proficient. She says it is “beautiful looking and sounding,” and is a common instrument that an ethnomusicologist might be expected to teach in a university program, and therefore a highly valuable experience to have.

Dr. Waterman says the ensemble will provide a highly visible “anchor” ensemble in world music for the ethnomusicology aspect of the School of Music’s undergraduate and graduate programming. As well, Acadia University in Wolfville, N.S., has a Sundanese gamelan, which will provide collaboration opportunities between Acadia and Memorial.

Photo: gamelan with its maker, Tentrem Sarwanto

Cultural Landscapes talk in Bay Roberts, March 21st

The Bay Roberts Visitors Pavilion

Don't forget to join the HFNL on Thursday, March 21st for our guest speaker Julian Smith. He will be giving a free talk on creating cultural landscapes in our communities. Everyone is welcome!

Time: 1pm-2pm
Date: March 21st, 2013
Location: Bay Roberts Visitors Pavilion, on the Veteran's Memorial Highway.

Brushing up on your Sheila folklore

Perhaps the most memorable of those occasions was on the night of 'Sheila's Brush,' which is to say the 18th of March. Newfoundland has two 'brushes,' Patrick's and Sheila's; that is to say, storms supposed to be connected with the birthday of St Patrick and that of his wife... The word 'brush' is not always used, however; you will hear Newfoundlanders say: 'We have our Sheila dis time o' year.'

- George Allan England, 1877—1936, Vikings of the Ice (Garden City: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1924) as quoted in the Dictionary of Newfoundland English. 

I'm waking up this morning to snow, reports of school closures in other parts of the province, and Twitter and Facebook status updates mentioning Sheila's Brush. In Newfoundland English, a brush is a "sudden gust of wind, a spell of wet weather; a [snow] storm." You can read up on more Newfoundland snow words on the DNE blog, Twig.

Most Newfoundlanders, I suspect, know that Sheila's Brush refers to a snowstorm after St. Patrick's Day. Some say it is meant to represent Sheila sweeping up after St. Patrick. Who Sheila is supposed to be, exactly, is something of a mystery, be she wife, sister, maid or mistress. 

For info on that other Sheila, check out Dr. Philip Hiscock's A Perfect Princess: The Twentieth-Century Legend of Sheila na Geira and Gilbert Pike.

Note on image above: Photo by rebfoto. If you know the name of the original mural artist, post a comment!

"Living Spaces" book launch Monday, March 18th

Most new students spend their first weeks of school in stuffy classrooms. But in a new program through the Department of Folklore at Memorial University, new graduate students spent their first days exploring a small Bonavista Bay fishing community. During the last three weeks of September 2012, the Department of Folklore introduced a new course for incoming graduate students on cultural documentation techniques.

“I decided that I would focus on the community of Keels in Bonavista Bay,” says course organizer Dr. Gerald Pocius. “Unlike previous field courses, this one would actually take place outside the classroom, with students living away from their usual environments, focusing on a place and people different to most of them.”

Timed to coincide with this year’s 20th anniversary of the cod moratorium, the field school examined how outmigration and gentrification affected the traditional cultural landscape of the Bonavista region, focusing on the last two inshore fishing families in the community of Keels. Students lived in the town, and worked to document buildings, including homes, fisheries buildings and root cellars. Along the way they interacted with and interviewed locals about their lives and work. The results of the field school, including architectural drawings and descriptions of some of the spaces studied have been put together in a booklet, “Living Spaces: The Architecture of the Family Fishery in Keels, Newfoundland,” edited by Pocius.

“Both the field school and the booklet have been a cooperative project between Memorial University and the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador,” says Dale Jarvis, folklorist with the foundation. “These types of partnerships are a great way to help students develop real-world skills, and to demonstrate to communities the type of research that is going on within the university. It also helps us with the foundation’s mandate of promoting and preserving the important architectural and intangible cultural heritage of this province.”

The booklet will be launched at a public event at 6pm, March 18th, 2013 at Bianca’s, 171 Water Street, St. John’s. The event is open to the public, though people are asked to RSVP with Christina Robarts at 739-1892 ext 7, or by email at christina@heritagefoundation.ca

Creating Cultural Landscapes: Including Culture in Development

On Wednesday, March 20th, from 12:00 to 1:30, Julian Smith will be leading a discussion on cultural landscapes as a "Synergy Session" put on by the HFNL and MUN's Harris Centre. While the session is now full, Julian Smith's talk will still be accessible as a free webinar. To learn more about this presentation, and to register for the webinar, please visit the invitation provided by the Harris Centre.

 
Julian Smith is an educator, architect, and planner. He founded the graduate program in heritage conservation at Carleton in 1988, and later helped create the joint Carleton-Trent Ph.D. program in Canadian Studies. He is currently Executive Director of the Willowbank School and Centre for Cultural Landscape in Queenston, Ontario. He is also a practicing architect and planner--his recent projects include restoration of the Vimy Memorial in France.  He is co-author of the 2011 UNESCO Recommendation on Historic Urban Landscapes.

Folklore Photo: Masonic Temple in Twillingate

This photo is of the Masonic Temple in Twillingate, built by Joshua Roberts in 1906. Dated 1908, this photo was found while cleaning up the Heritage Foundation's heritage structure designation files. Click here if you'd like more information about the Masonic Temple in Twillingate.  -Nicole

Root Cellars Rock The Rooms

Coffee and Culture: Root Cellars
March 14, 2:30pm
The Rooms Theatre

How do you keep vegetables fresh without electricity? In a root cellar of course! From use in years past to modern day, root cellars have become iconic in Newfoundland and Labrador. Folklorist Crystal Braye and Sarah Ferber from Root Cellars Rock will be at The Rooms to tell you all about them. Presented in collaboration with the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador.

 

Root cellar photos courtesy of Crystal Braye.

Lectures, launches, and living spaces

In the March 2013 edition of the Intangible Cultural Heritage Update for Newfoundland and Labrador: we announce the launch of "Living Spaces: The Architecture of the Family Fishery in Keels, Newfoundland,” a report based on the 2012 Keels Folklore Field School, edited by Dr. Gerald Pocius; researchers Lisa Wilson and Christina Robarts provide articles celebrating International Women’s Day; we announce a series of March events related to cultural landscapes and root cellars; and we gear up for “Newfiki – A celebration of Eastern-European cultures in Newfoundland” with stories, music, art, and a pierogi-making workshop with instruction by the Department of Folklore’s Dr. Mariya Lesiv.

Contributors: Dale Jarvis, Lisa Wilson, Christina Robarts, Crystal Braye. 

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