MUSIC
 |
The first time Kendra MacGillivray picked up a fiddle, she was just a little girl. Her mother was taking fiddle lessons. And thanks to her grandfather, celebrated Cape Breton fiddler Hugh A. MacDonald, the fiddle was an important part of family life.
So young Kendra picked up the instrument and picked out a tune. I express amazement but she shrugs. It’s clear, for her, playing is as natural as breath.
She didn’t actually begin formal training until several years later. She grew up in Antigonish. There was a sense in the community that fiddle music was dying out. The high school music teacher was enlisted to give some lessons. Kendra signed up, along with classmates Natalie MacMaster and Ashley MacIssac. “I know,” she says, laughing a bit. “It was quite the class.”
She first stepped on the stage at the Antigonish Legion at age 10. She remembers hearing a man yell “very good, dear.” Though it was not that moment that set her on her fiddle playing path, it was certainly a moment that taught her how good it feels to set a crowd on fire.
Which she has been doing ever since. She played all through university and, just after graduation was hired to be a kind of fiddling ambassador for tourism in Nova Scotia. That job gave her the sense and the confidence to pursue fiddling as a career.
But there was another force at work, too. The fact that she is Hugh A. MacDonald’s granddaughter has given a special sort of life to her playing and to her career. In 1967, a recording of his music was played at the Canada Pavilion at Expo. Thirty three years later, Kendra played the same music at the Canada Pavilion at the Expo in Germany.
“I love keeping him alive through music, “she says.
Her grandfather’s tunes also led to the beginning of her latest musical partnership. She and husband-to-be Bruce Rainnie decide they wanted some of her grandfather’s music at their wedding. So Bruce learned to accompany her on guitar and together, at the wedding, they played his tunes. They liked playing together so much that they have continued and are now mainstays at concerts and benefits across the Island.
Some of those tunes tunes are featured on her latest CD, Love O’ the Isles.
It was her deep love of traditional tunes that inspired that CD as well. Though she could have played more familiar and popular fiddle music, she opted for lesser known work. She poured through old music books, looking for unfamiliar tunes that caught her fancy. She wanted to record them on Cape Breton so spent one jam packed week in a studio there, laying down the tracks. She had to work quickly because her latest project, son Mark, was waiting back at home. In fact, because the fiddling apple does not fall far from the tree, one of the tunes on the album was inspired by her young son’s love of music.
“His favourite thing is to sit at the piano and try to play. He was doing that and I was picking out a tune and I thought ‘gee, that’s not bad.’” The result? A reel on the album called Mark Anthony Rainnie.
The tile Love O’ the Isles is a tribute, both to MacGillivray’s Cape Breton roots and her new Island home. She says she believes that fiddle music has kind of greased the wheels of her acceptance as a come from away Islander. She says that everywhere she goes on PEI, she feels welcome. It might be her sweet manner. It might be the smile that always lurks on the edges of her lips. But chances are good it’s also the fiddle on her arm that has made Islanders eager to see her, hopeful that she might give us a tune.