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The story of a cultural touchstone and its impact

Fiddlers, step dancers, storytellers, traditional singers, and folklorists staged Montreal’s first veillée in 1919. All that was missing, announced one of the organizers, was a magic carpet to transport the audience into the countryside and a kiss of forgetfulness to erase the woes of modern life.

Laura Risk tells the story of the veillées and explores how these commercial performances of idealized rural life became part of Quebec’s cultural heritage. Her in-depth examinations of key performances and recordings follow traditional music and dance from the stage onto radio, records and other audio media, and television. Throughout, Risk documents how veillées redefined folklore in twentieth-century Quebec and illuminates how their distinctive framing of traditional musicians and repertoire impacts the performance and reception of the music to the present day.

Astute and evocative, Music and the Staged Veillée in Quebec reveals the music, dancing, call-and-response songs, and extramusical associations winding through century-long conversations about nation, culture, and identity in Quebec.

Throughout the nineteenth century, people heard more music in the theatre—accompanying popular dramas such as Frankenstein, Oliver Twist, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Lady Audley’s Secret, The Corsican Brothers, The Three Musketeers, as well as historical romances by Shakespeare and Schiller—than they did in almost any other area of their lives. But unlike film music, theatrical music has received very little attention from scholars and so it has been largely lost to us. In this groundbreaking study, Michael V. Pisani goes in search of these abandoned sounds.

Mining old manuscripts and newspapers, he finds that starting in the 1790s, theatrical managers in Britain and the United States began to rely on music to play an interpretive role in melodramatic productions. During the nineteenth century, instrumental music—in addition to song—was a common feature in the production of stage plays.

The music played by instrumental ensembles not only enlivened performances but also served other important functions. Many actors and actresses found that accompanimental music helped them sustain the emotional pitch of a monologue or dialogue sequence. Music also helped audiences to identify the motivations of characters. Playwrights used music to hold together the hybrid elements of melodrama, heighten the build toward sensation, and dignify the tragic pathos of villains and other characters. Music also aided manager-directors by providing cues for lighting and other stage effects. Moreover, in a century of seismic social and economic changes, music could provide a moral compass in an uncertain moral universe.

Featuring dozens of musical examples and images of the old theatres, Music for the Melodramatic Theatre charts the progress of the genre from its earliest use in the eighteenth century to the elaborate stage productions of the very early twentieth century.