Celtic Colours International Festival

Festival Location: Cape Breton Island, Canada

Festival Type(s): Folk Music Festivals, Traditional Music Festivals

Celtic Colours International Festival

By: © Kerry Dexter 2009

Mountain and sea, forest and rocky coastline, warm firesides and quiet spaces -- all these have shaped the lives and the music of the people on Cape Breton at the far northern tip of Atlantic Canada. Centuries ago, people began coming here from Ireland, France, New England and most especially the highlands of Scotland, driven by political and personal upheaval to seek a new land. They brought their musics with them, and in the wild places an quiet villages of their new home, they shaped a music of their own, played on fiddle, piano, accordion bodhran and guitar and sung in English and Scots Gaelic. It's a music in some ways so true to Scottish tradition that Scots themselves have come over ot learn from the Cape Bretoners. In other hands it's be come a music all its own fusing the experience of this isolated land on the far Atlantic shore of Canada with the history of the people who settled on it. It's a living, vibrant music that people with last names like Chiasson, MacMaster, MacNeil, MacIsaac, Lamond, and Beaton have take around the world. Every year, in October, the people of Cape Breton invite the world home to share their traditions, their landscape, their music, and their welcome, during the festival called Celtic Colours.

For nearly two weeks around the Canadian Thanksgiving holiday in mid October each year, the towns and villages and crossroads of Cape Breton are alive with music -- or more alive than usual, as music is always a big part of things on the island. If the weather co operates, the landscape is alive with a brilliant backdrop of fall colours, as well. Concert halls fill up, of course, but churches, community centers, the historic grounds at Fort Louisbourg, the Gaelic College at Saint Anne's, school assembly halls, and firehouses across the island vie each year to host concerts. Not just concerts by Cape Breton musicians either -- every season many of the top players from the Celtic music scenes of Ireland, Scotland, the United States, all across Canada, and other parts of the world come to play. Super star musicians including Le Vent du Nord, Kathryn Tickell, Karine Polwart, Carlos Nunez, and Cathie Ryan have joined Cape Breton favorites such as Natalie MacMaster, Andrea Beaton, and Kimberly Fraser in recent years. Your chances of seeing many of your musical heroes -- as well as meeting musicians you've never seen before -- are really good, too. Their are at least half a dozen concerts in different parts of the island each night during the festivals nearly two week run, and most of these feature short sets by three or four acts and then a finale where everyone joins in. The familiar and the unexpected live happily side by side at Celtic Colours concerts, as they do at the after hours festival club at Saint Anne's, which offers a high energy and less formal audience atmosphere in which to enjoy your favorite players.

It's not just about the music during Celtic Colours, either. There are art exhibits, talks on Cape Breton history, Gaelic singing [Cape Breton has the most Scots Gaelic speakers outside of Scotland], and other topics; there are hikes and walks, workshops, and community meals on offer. There are sure to be informal music sessions too going on too. Whether you come for one evening's worth of events or stay for the whole run of the festival, you'll quickly find yourself at concerts that take on the atmosphere of conversations among friends rather than performances. It's that community feeling about the the playing, listening sharing of music which is the heart of Celtic Colours.

by Kerry Dexter

Celtic Colours International Festival Dates and Location

Celtic Colours is held each October in Cape Breton at the far northern tip of Atlantic Canada. For more information, check out the Celtic Colours web site.