Ghost Music

[Tim Strzechowski]

This is excellent!  Thank you for sharing such a relevant article!



----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Ghetta Life" <ghetta_outta at hotmail.com>
To: <pynchon-l at waste.org>
Sent: Monday, July 17, 2006 10:23 AM
Subject: Ghost Music


>
> http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20060715.wfiddle15/BNStory/Entertainment/home
>
> INVERNESS, N.S. - Thirty years ago, fiddler John MacDougall thought he was 
> going crazy. Onstage at a concert in Broad Cove, N.S., strange music 
> suddenly drowned out his own fiddle playing.
>
> Yet no one else was visible onstage, nor could anyone hear the mysterious 
> tunes. Frustrated and confused, MacDougall packed up his fiddle and exited 
> stage left. Still, the music followed him home. He couldn't see those 
> musical apparitions, but he could clearly hear the notes wafting from the 
> ceiling of his cramped trailer that night.
>
> Perched on the edge of his bed, he resolved to document them for all time. 
> That feverish night, he scored 65 tunes before finally collapsing.
>
> "They started coming so fast I could hardly write them down," MacDougall 
> now muses as he sits among his collection of eight fiddles that are 
> strategically place around the room for easy access. One is on his 
> living-room couch, and his favourite, a "sweet" 300-year-old instrument 
> with a repaired bullet hole, occupies pride of place on the kitchen table.
>
> All these years later, the white-haired, but still energetic musician 
> continues to entertain those ghostly visitations, but the pace has slowed.
>
> Holed up in his trailer in Inverness, Cape Breton, the 81-year-old master 
> fiddler pens 10 to 15 tunes a day, often hunched over his kitchen table. 
> By his own count - and he keeps a daily tally on small sheets of paper - 
> he has produced 33,300 compositions, but he still balks at publishing 
> them, saying he hasn't yet reached his personal goal of 35,000.
>
> Yet MacDougall insists he's not creating art; he's simply recording 
> history.
>
> "It's from the people who lived here before ... they could make [songs], 
> but they couldn't write them," he says.
>