By Rachel Davis
As a musician, this career can take you to places you never expect, at the very last minute. The latest edition of this in my life happened to me back in May, when I had the great opportunity (thanks to the Celtic Colours International Festival) to travel to Australia with my fellow musician Maxim Cormier, for two weeks of adventure, music, and meeting wonderful new people. The process of finding out, and actually jetting off to Oz was a bit of a whirlwind, but it didn’t take long to relax with some great musicians and start exploring and playing tunes!
The part that sticks in my mind the most about the trip would have to be collaborating for two days with Australian and Scottish musicians on a beautiful piece of music written by John Somerville, which would be performed at the National Celtic Festival in Portarlington. This was something brand new to me – I’ve never been involved in this type of “Celtic orchestra” before, and it amazed me how quickly so many parts came together. With such a wide variety of instruments, and so many melody and harmony parts coming together, it was wonderful to watch all of these roles come together, and so quickly. The piece was written by John for the voyage of the ship Hector, which traveled from Scotland to Nova Scotia (where I’m from) and came above terrible conditions to make it to Canada. Some folks would later leave Nova Scotia and head for Australia, proving there’s more of a connection with all of our countries than many of us realized. It was amazing to listen to everything come together, and perform it at the festival.
From playing tunes, to running around the rainy streets of Melbourne looking for restaurants, to spotting kangaroos along the Great Ocean Road, to listening to wicked bands in Portarlington, we had some great times over our short two week visit to Australia, but we made the most of it. Hanging out with the wonderful group of musicians from Feis Rois in Scotland was a blast, and we quickly found out from doing a couple of gigs together in Melbourne that we had quite a few tunes in common. Our fiddle style in Cape Breton came about from Scottish immigrants settling on the Island hundreds of years ago, so it’s only right that we we’d have a few that we all knew They’re all such wonderful people, along with our wonderful Cape Breton Aussie friend Jack, and I can’t wait until they all come to visit for our Celtic Colours Festival in October!
Exchanges like this are an incredible opportunity for us as musicians. Not only do you get to visit beautiful places like Australia (a place you may never get to visit otherwise), but you meet wonderful people, perform at lovely venues like our acoustic shows at the National Celtic Festival, and find new connections you have with other countries that you may not have realized before. It’s always amazing to me that our music on Cape Breton Island can make it so far around the world and be enjoyed by so many, but there was plenty of CB representation in Australia for the Festival, with myself and Max, and Dawn & Margie Beaton’s band. It was quite a treat to watch a room full of Australians dancing Cape Breton square sets!
I was so glad to be asked to be involved with this exchange project. It was a great opportunity to share music with great new friends, and I can’t wait to do it all again in Cape Breton!
