Bilingual sign, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, in Scottish Gaelic (Photo credit: Wikipedia)Scottish tenants brutally forced off their land in the Highland Clearances of the late 18th and early 19th centuries have a direct bearing on why Gillian Boucher plays the fiddle.The Canadian violinist, who will perform with musicians Andrew White and Owen Van Larkins at the Bent Horseshoe Cafe in Tokomaru tomorrow, says she was so uncool at school in the 1970s, learning to play traditional Scottish music on the violin. Everyone else was learning drums or guitar; the idea still persisted to internationalise (or dump) the local Scottish culture.
Her maternal grandparents' first language was Gaelic, but in the 1960s, her parents were punished if they spoke Gaelic or French at school.
English or nothing: Boucher's electing to learn the music of her great-grandparents was offbeat, to say the least. "Now, of course, with tourism, it's become trendy. In a class of 30 children these days you'll find five or six learning the fiddle."
