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Paper short abstract

Building on the expressive matrix between Scottish Gaelic supernatural legend, song and instrumental music, this paper seeks to extend such entangled assemblages to multimodal phenomenologies at the intersections of traditional ecological knowledge, material culture, and the environment.

Paper long abstract

In the various versions of the port-à-beul (mouth music) to the reel “Am Muileann Dubh” (‘The Black Mill’), listeners are introduced to what is purported to be a preposterous summer pastoral scene at a mill in which wild bird nests, livestock, barley meal, snuff tobacco and the devil himself are present. As an extension of the lyrics, John Shaw identifies a Cape Breton legend type, which details the tune's origins through characteristics found in both supernatural and religious legends. These narratives serve as a Cape Breton variation on the Faustian bargain [M211], at the crossroads between musical gain and damnation, thwarting the priest’s delivery of extreme unction upon the departing family member of a novice fiddler. Several versions provide a coda in which the tune is banned from further performance by clerical intercession and thus serves as a point of subversive ‘folk’ reflection and contestation eschewing clerical power in favour of ethnoaesthetically centred criteria and sensual pleasures in this feelingful ‘garden of earthly delights’. When examining the versions of this tune’s origin legend from Highland Scotland alongside toponymic evidence, there is a conspicuous lack of clerical censure, with a reframing around illicit whisky production and smuggling. Building on the inter-genre reinforcement of the expressive matrix between Scottish Gaelic legend, song and instrumental music, this paper seeks to extend this entangled assemblage to multimodal phenomenologies at the intersections of traditional ecological knowledge, material culture, and the environment that challenges the binary ontologies of nature/culture, salvation/damnation, pleasure/abstinence through such interpersonal more-than-human encounters.