Andrew Cronshaw
February 1999
Folk Alliance, Albuquerque, NM

This was a great interview! Andrew had been awake for too many hours already in transit and anticipated performing sometime after midnight. I had some kind of coldlike, fever-inducing disease and had drunk a lot of cough syrup. I think sometime during the interview I started hallucinating.

I'm going to wind you up and you are going to talk.
Wind me up in the direction of what you want to know.
Who are you?
Andrew Cronshaw.
And what do you do for a living?
Ah...how much do you need to know. Quite a lot of different hats I wear, really.
As I was telling you, the first time I heard of you was with an album called Til the Beast's Returning. Its an LP which is now very scratchy.
Actually, it's come out again. Most of the tracks are on The Andrew Cronshaw CD. It was in the early days when there weren't very many CDs out, so we thought it would be good to call it The Andrew Cronshaw CD. It sounds silly now because of course it's a CD, everythings a CD now. Yes, and most of that and all of the previous album The Great Dark Water are compiled on that CD...we were just going to fit one or two tracks on it, so...
You've done other things obviously.
Umm...
Zither. I was going to say zither.
Zither. Yes.
Is that all you play, zither?
Oh, no, no. I play whatever the tune needs, really. Somepeople seem to play what they can on the instrument they're playing. I see it the other way around. I see tunes I want to play and I move instruments until they seem to sit...so the tune itself is what comes out. It's like the instruments are just the tools. I'm not very good with people who play remarkable tunes, as remarkable as they can do on a bass guitar, I mean, certain tunes sit well on wind instruments. One day I will pick up an instrument and a tune will sit on it. I use whatever...I acquire a lot of instruments, they find their uses you know. They find a particular tune they like.
Do you have a primary instrument?
The zither is the primary instrument. But before I played it I played tin whistle and I learned piano when I was a kid, but that was for a year or so. Didn't practice enough. And I played the guitar and sang like you do when you're an impressionable youth when the Beatles were around.
Uh-oh.
Well, whatever, it was that period.
I remember that.
But I was into folk music...what I thought was folk music then., which was basically Peter, Paul & Mary, I suppose. But the first thing I could play that made real sense to me...which I still play strangely wnough...the tin whistle, the main one, which I got back in 1971 or 1975...
Hasn't been misplaced!
No, it makes a great noice. I worked on it to do [unintell.] and I thought I wrecked it and carried on carving away at the mouthpiece, it returned to making a sound and it was the sound I wanted it to make. The tube is wearing out now, the holes are getting bigger, so...some of these days I'm gonna...it's the same original whistle, but...no, I use a lot of other wind instruments now, I use the va-wu (?) which is the Chinese thing with like a free reed in it.and a whole lot of other things, fuyaris (?) which is a big 5 foot Slovakian flute...
Where were you from originally?
Lancashire. North West England.
Lancashire. Wow. Up in the North...
Yeh. I live in London now but I lived in Scotland for a long time.
Yeh, I think you had played some Scottish tunes. Are you getting...I know that the tunes on that album some of them were traditional and some of them had...
Actually, virtually everything I do is traditional.
Is it?
In terms of the source material and I tend to stick pretty closely...I'll just try and change the tune I'm gonna do...now more consciously. I used to, when I started I was just trying to play something...and when I discovered the zither, what happened with that, the one I play is like an auto harp without the bars, really, the left hand is playing bunches of strings, it arranges chords, it's technically called a guitar zither or a Prince Of Wales harp, its got lots of names, it's an invention of the last century. And there were a lot made in The States. It was made particularly by German manufacturers and then exported across Europe and into America or by German manufacturers in America and it was never intended as a serious instrument. It was meant for accompanying hymns or picking out God Save the King on most of the time. For me, I kind of have. There was an Australian woman called Jilly Abica (?) who used to sing and play the zither and I saw it in the shop...I could do that. It was a slightly different version, you have to look at mine, it has melody strings. In the days The Incredible String band and people like that you know lots of varied instruments so I sort of got led into it. And electrifying it was what made the stat (?) you know. It just happened to be the perfect... it was a handmade pickup...everything came right about it. I still use the same pickup and everything. It doesn't harm it, doesn't <uninstall.> the regular noise and it was made in 1971...and nothing we can do comes close to that particular one. So that's the key to...that's what got me to listening. "Hey what's that?" But anyway, they're it, they're in. Whereas with the guitar, it's a guitar, Yeh they know that. If you've got something they don't know about then you've got...its like you can either start at the bottom of someone else's ladder, like the violin or something, or you can make your own little step-ladder, you know. Pretty rapidly and that's how I figured it.
I should have taken up the...zither. (Laughter) So what are you doing today?
Today? Specifically this day?
No, not today!
Well, nowadays I have several things I do. I play gigs....with lots of instruments and gear, and when I'm over here, I'm not using the whole set of it. Its not a full gig. At the moment I'm not doing many solo gigs, because there's all this new material and I'm just gone to Finland doing the new album. Which is all Fenno-Ugrian material. I went over there planning to half Scottish Gaelic and half Fenno-Ugrian...
Half Swedish, what?
Fenno-Ugrian, its not just Finnish music but the whole...Finnish is a different language and the whole cultural spectrum comes all the way from Saamiland...from Lappland, down through Finland all the way...the southern end of it is in Hungary. Right across the Soviet Union as far as the Urals and further. And there are various unifying aspects to the cultural tradition. To cut a long story short...
So there's a dividing line right there through Sweden and Finland...
Yeh. Absolutely. Well, for a starting point, Finland isn't in Scandanavia. It's in Norden but it's not in Scandanavia. Scandinavia's just Sweden, Norway, and Denmark, really...possibly Iceland by association. But yeh, there is a big difference. Liguistically, there is a total difference. Finnish is unrelated. It's a non-Indio-European language; its not related to any other European languages, apart from the other Fenno-Ugrian, so there's a whole way of approaching the world. So there;s that. But when I got to Finland, I just...I go there a lot and I just couldn't think...the Gaelic stuff just couldn't come out. It just didn't happen. I wanted to just play the music...what I'm recording is Kaustinen which is where the Finnish band that was here came from, and everybody plays music, its just a very musical place and what comes out of the walls at you is not necessarily the music thats on the album, but it's different...the scale is different, the whole...it's not like playing Celtic music, BUT there are relations between it and Gaelic work songs and that's again, it's the whole Runo-level, the old European level before jigs, reels, polskas and all that came in and that was what I was trying to get at, and what we have done. And no chords.
When did the jigs, reels, and polskas come in?
Um...18th centuryish. I mean, polskas were one of the first sort of dance crazes to sweep Europe. And so when people think they are playing foreign (?) music they're actually playing...that's why, you listen to a Ukrainian fiddler you hear the same tunes you're hearing from English country musicians because those were the hits of the day. So if you dig, if you scratch deeper than that you come up with a much older layer, and not just of tunes, not just the melodic material, but a way of making music and seeing music, and it's different, it's not perfoirmance, it's not beginnings and middles and ends, its not gentlemen here's the next number, it's not performance, its just making music like you breathe, like you talk, you know.
So is this the commonplace thing in the British Isles...I mean perfomance.
No, yes...As you know the British Isles has lots of traditions in the British Isles, but lots of the prevailing ones, stong ones are still of that later generation, but in each country, they're imbued with...a dance craze comes in its interpreted in light of what people really know, what instruments they use and how their scales are and so on, and that's why for example you have polka, polska, those things that were originally theoretically Polish dances but they sound different in every country. Differernt rhythms, because they were just an exotic influence and people interpreted it as they knew...they still interpret tango for example in ways that were appropriate to what they already knew.
Is Finland common with Argentine tango?
Well, it's basically the same thing, but it's not...the function is different and form has become different. Finnish tango is almost all in the minor key. It's...the dancing is much less exotic actually than Argentine tango is. And its role is different. It's like...it's a way for hard men to express passionate emotions in a cold climate. It was a ray of sunshine in a cold climate. It swept into Europe and on into Russia but it stuck particularly in Finland...it's not the only place...Sweden and Norway too, but the couple dancing is very popular because people like doing it.
You stay warm.
Yeh, but the main thing is that it does a lot...it's like the role of country music, the quite sclocky country music in The States in a way. There are certain things that sound like a musical soap opera and in tango you can sing emotions which a Finnish...I mean Finns are not demonstraive linguistically or any other way particularly. They don't talk about emotions but in tango they can. So that's really what its role is. And people really like dancing, you know. It is a nice dance to do. And that's another layer, where it came later than say polska. The Svenska polskas...the Swedish ones. So there's this layer of later culture but what I was interested in getting at was the earlier layer which had been associted in Finland with the runo-song, the Kalevala period which...the Kalevala is the national epic, but it was actually put together from older songs in the last century.
Its like Ruth MacKenzie.
No, right...I mean I was there when she got it..she didn;t know where she was from in Finland..
Is there a metal band that does that as well?
Sorry?
Sorry.
Well, Ruth did this thing about the Dream of The Salmon Maiden, but the Kalevala is drawn from a collection of folk poetry sung all with the basic tune format and same rhythm 4/4 trichaic(?) Meter. Which was made into the national epic, but only part of it.. It runs to 300,000 verses so there's no one story to the Kalevala. So you can't DO the Kalevala on an album, it's very very long,. Even the book is long and it's very complex. Ther's a lot of repetition in it. But the rhythm and the idea of a national folk poetry inspired a whole lot of people, including Hiawatha. Think about Hiawatha rhythm. Think about Hiawatha that comes directly from the Kalevala. Wadsworth was one of the romantic poets right across Europe and in American who saw what was happening in Finland who were inpired by that idea, the National Epic. Lets make an epic. So he made a American-ISH national epic. And the rhythm, the Kalevala rhythm, that's runo-song and you find it...still find it in Finnish song. Now it rhymes..., the early stuff didn't rhyme it was alliterative with internal rhythms, and it was prevalent all across northern Europe.
Has the language changed a lot since then?
Finnish?
Yeh.
No. I mean it's understandable. Its not modern Finnish, but when the Kalevala came out, the educated Finns didn't speak Finnish, because they spoke the power language which was Swedish. Or in some cases Russian, but mainly Swedish. Because Finland's been successively Swedish and Russian.
I saw you at WOMEX with all the Swedes and I guess I've seen you perform as a someone talking about Scandinavian music.
Nordic music.
Yeh.
Is something actually happening?
I'm here is that I wanted to <?> but also so I...I can see that something is going to happen and it would be nice if people got the right id Yeh. You can see something happening in the countries themselves but of course it has been for a while. It's bursting out, it's going to happen anyway. The reason ea about it...other than be converted instantly into some sort of Nordic Twilight thing, like the wispier bits of the celtoid phenomenon.
Is something happening to Celtic music, because every time I go into the store there's a lot of compilations.
I don't think anything's happening; I think it's an immense Riverdance...I don't mean just Riverdance, but the Titanic and all that stuff. Celtic music is everywhere. What is Celtic music? You know, it's become some sort of strange deliniation of some sort of racial...imaginary racial thing. There is no hard and fast way...the Celts were everywhere in Europe. It doesn't matter...amke sense...what people are attracted by is those who clung on around the edges in the so-called Celtic countries. But the fact is that...where does that put Germany? Germany was Celtic.
Oh really?
Yeh, of course. But the way people processed across Europe, they intermingled, you know, how far back do you want to go? Musically...the music doesnt go that far back. Its ridiculous to say what's Celtic music. People keep banging on about Celtic music...the Celts were, we're talking about in terms of thousands of years, large numbers of centuries. The music is only, you know the tunes they are talking about being obsessed by being Celtic with the exception of the older work songs and so on...the Gaelic stuff I was trying to get at...
Is that like waulking songs?
Yeh, waulking songs are the ones that survived the longest because waulking survived longer than a lot of the work activities. But there are other things that didn't start up as waulking songsbecame waulking songs. But there were rowing songs...a lot of it was womens stuff, as in the runo-songs, that's one of the connections, the sort of <?> its true in Latvian and Lithuanian doinas, again you have the same village life, common to people, sometimes stories, sometimes heroic epics, not in the Latvian case because they didn't have that many heroes basically. At least not the sort of all-conquering fighting type. They sang about what was inportant to them and they sang in particular rhythms and they used songs for everyday functions, for harvest, for weddings, but you know a three day wedding every...until recently every aspect of a wedding would have a song or tune they'd sing, like when the bride came out of the house. And swing songs. In some countries you had songs that were sung on the big village communcal swing.So the role of music was different and we see it and we see it...it's become part of the industrial revolution to us, it's like division of labor. There's performers and there's listeners. And that's not very healthy. I've met with Madagascarans and they don't see that..."What do you mean you just play and they just listen? That's crazy. The audience? What audience? Don't they all join in, don't they dance or something?" And we got into a ...we sit and watch the television, we sit and watch sports, we pay other people to do our sports, We pay other people to do our music for us, and then these people who normally would make music for their own satisfaction now have to think about marketing their music to be able to do it, and that is where all this conference is about. In America it's more so, but Western society has turned music into a ....it was always a commodity in the sense that if you had a wedding you wanted professional gypsy musicians tp play for your wedding or whatever. But its like every part of music is structured now, you have to put...learn to do music you have to go to the music college or you have to get a book and learn to play, it's like saying you have to learn to read before you can speak, its not organic,its not natural. So there's all sorts of ways we approach music which are wrong and I feel much freer to think of those terms in Finland where the rules are different and you can get triangulation on the precepts that we've got which are not quite the same as those in Finland. It's not the same the further east you go in the country. Or further south in <?>. So I'm going on but this is like something that's important to me. It's the role of seeing what music is. But I'm part of the commercial thing.I do gigs and it worries me, it bothers me.
Do you go out with other people?You must jam...
No a lot. I record with other people. I'm best with other people when they play what I want! I do sessions, eyh, I do play on other people's albums and stuff. Mostly they're pop things, they're kindof brief. Increasingly I do what I want to do and its <?> together, but at the gigs, mainly I'm a solo performer, live, and sort of always was, but I see no point in making records that are like the gig. They're a diffeernt thing. They're intended to create pictures in your home. They're intended to jump out of your speakers in your living room in London and be something. Take you somewhere, for the wall of the room to drop away. Not just be a recital of what I can do, I mean, yeh, the first album was that. You might have had some atmosphere but I was just playing the tunes I knew.
That's very pristine.
What?
The album I have is very pristine.
That's the beast.
Crystalline.
It's not as crystalline as I would like. It was on vinyl, you know. I was glad to see vinyl go, except for the sleeves, I sort of liked them. Its great now not to have to worry about that. And also now we're been using a lot of Hoddis <?> editing. You wouldnt dare, it doesn't sound techno or anything.like that, it's just that it allows us to shift things until the picture emerges. Generally if it doesnt emerge in the playing its not there at all. So its vety pictoral, not like descriptive, but when things come into focus, its like even if <?> live mixing, when things come into focus. And that's it, that's the way that band sounds, that's what they're projecting.
Do you do production for other people?
Yeh. I produced June Tabor for quite a while. In Finland, some people there. Whatever. I'm not a gun for hire particularly, I do the people I want to do.
So what's going on with English music now.
A good question.
Not a lot. There's Eliza Carthy, of course, a generation of the children of the older generation are doing some pretty good stuff. But it isnt really enough compared to what's happening in Norden. England has an identity problem and also an imperialism problem. If you say, if someone in America came to me and said, "I think I'll do English music," and they said "Can't do that!" I mean obviously they DO English music but not overtly, you don't make a big noise about it. You can say this is Scottish music or Irish music or Russian music. Its much more...its because of its imperealistic history, that it's slightly less PC to make a noise about it. But also England isn't one place, it's a regional, and it's a broken tradition. There are tenuous links that go back, like the Coppers for example, but the links are pretty tenuous. So you're reinventing your music. And the problem is in Finland, that's not aproblem. Like the Scottish musician I worked for, Jim Sutherland, said "Every tune I make is a Scottish tune because I'm Scottish. He knows who he is where he is and he doesn't have to think about "Is this traditional?" And in Finland, everything that's done is Finnish. Particularly if the people have studied folk music for a long time and say "I'm not trying to be an American here, I'm just doing what comes naturally, but I do know a lot about...I had the shapes of the old music in me.whethehr you've learned them or sort of acquired them at your mother's knee. And in England we have that sort of choice problem...I think it's universal in the west, we have this problem that we can choose traditian. If you're in the living tradition, you just do it. You don't get someone that's in the tradition, say West African, well, a generation ago in West African culture saying, "I think I'll do Soukous today." They do the music that's of interest to the people in the village or whatever, and even they now have a choice. "Shall I do the mainstream or shall I do the traditional instruments?" or whatever. And we have this choice, and no we're faced with so many choices in England we don't know what to choose. "Shall we do American music? Shall we do conscious world music collages?" You know. All of that. So. I think you have to sort of absorb what you absorb, and then play the tune...it's important...I think composition's important. I think English music ran into a problem during the folk revival. It ran into a problem when people run out of stuff to do. They've done all the stories, and they started to write new stuff. So they write maybe new tunes but they didn't know, they weren't sufficiently imbued with the tradition to be able to automatically write in that tradition and they would look around for old stories that didn't have a ballad about them yet and do it in some sort of Mid-Atlantic ballad style. They hadn't really absorbed their tradition. And the folk-rock thing...lots of great stuff in there but it became like you'd end up with a rhytm section with a high school fiddler, who'd have a fiddlers tune book, and could play "eh eh eh eh." It wasn't like Sweden where the fiddler in the heaviest folk bands or the folk bands or the people playing in the traditional aspect, all the musicians are deeply imbued with it, they know how it goes, you know...and they often play, are deeply involved in acoustic music, or whatever, it isn't, wasn't like that in England, it was people making bands, they were so occupied with selling the music, and even more so in America. Making a band, who we gonna play to before "What have we to say? What are we?" And it also has to do with lots of community. If you're in a community, you make music that's appropriate to that community. If you're in a globalized society, you make your music at home and you try, as people are doing here, to kind of get someone to listen to it, you do a showcase. And hope that three people come and one of them might be a booker who might give you a gig in a coffeehouse and to which you'll have another three people come and maybe you'll sell 2 albums altogether. And it builds, you know. But that's a funny way of regarding something, you know you can't argue with it, that's what it has become, but the process is changed.
I had an interview with Slaid Cleaves, whom you probably don't know, he lives in Texas, he's a singer-songwirter,and he was talking about Texas traditions being more where people had to be involved with the music.
Yeh, I mean I personally...I live in London and I really find myself lacking a sense of community. When I'm in Kaustinen in Finland...I'm never going to be a part of that community because I don't have the gravestones in the churchyard, that's what it comes down to, all my friends, the Jarkelas, the Jokelas, you go down to the graveyard and they are there. Drives some of them crazy, they have to get out, but at least they know what it is they're getting out of. There's this connection. So I can never be part of this, but I do feel...I sense a community there, whether...you don't have to like everbody in the community but it is afunctional community in some way, and we like that. We're all on the internet and stuff. We communicate all day long with people across the world. But if you died one day, it would be months before they found out. "Haven't had an e-mail from Cronshaw for a while!" And I think music springs up in that creative environment, in that sense not music but art. You do what you like and other people get used to it. Its sort of a language between you. This is the ideological stuff so you're asking something specific.
No, I love it....Are there pockets of tradition IN England?
Yeh, there wasn't until recently any kind of...being revived a little bit. The East Anglian dulcimer tradition,for example, and singing pub songs, singing particular hymns, singing folk hymns that aren't done in church in some of the pubs in the north. One of my friends is a folk writer who studies specifically Englush regional customs, and there are some very strange customs, not necessarily with music attached, they may have, but the music may not be very important in them. Some very strange things happen like rolling cheese down a hill and chasing it, I mean, and setting tarpiles on fire. I mean, and when you do a TV program about this, "What is this, then?" And these are just English people relaxing! But also, the idea of a traditional custom where you do it that time of year not because someone's filming it, you do it because...there are some things that are not visual, you know, you just do it because if you don't then nobody else will. There's some families that perpetuate customs because they feel that if they stop, nobody else will do it, and it will die . That year it will stop. And then someone else may revive it, but it isn't the same. You know, it's a schoolteacher coming along and saying, "We used to do this in the village, let's do this again," the famous maypole thing, you know the kids dancing around the maypole with plaited ribbons, doesn't come from England at all, it was brought back from northern Spain.
It was?
Yeh. And when I was a kid I was in Northern Spain a lot, and you'd see Morris dancing...you get New Mexico Morris Dancers, there machinos (?) exactly the same, they're Morris dancers. Exactly, but it comes via Spain, it doesn't come from England. I only saw them yesterday, but they're doing it again today. And its Morris dancing, it's black faced people being Moors. Not a lot of Moors in New Mexico. But it comes via the Spaniards who...
When did that come over to England, do you have any idea?
It's hard to tell, really.
I guess there's not a lot of dates.
No. But people talk endlessly. "We do this to encourage fertility." Yeh, sure, but I mean that's the union archetype thing, where in reality people do it because they like it, because its that time of year. But if you look at Christmas, we do loads of stuff at Christmas we don't really like but we do it bceause it's Christmas. I mean, that's what folk custom is. It's a compuslsion to do it because if it doesn't feel right, you know. The way you have stuffing with your turkey, but you know, its not right without. (Laugh) But you know,
I'm gonna have to wrap up because the tape is getting a little funny here.
Well, its not to do with the music directly, but it's the underlying thing I'm trying to get at. And it is coming out in the music and the album is kind of reflective. I'm pleased to find...it was quickly, by accident, it just flowed. It wasn't coming out exactly as I had imagined but I'd been thinking about it pretty hard for 6 or 7
years so it was natural that this was the way it should go. But I'm...the musicians were just fabulous. I brought in one guy from Australia to play with me, and then Finnish musicians, you know, sprang into life. So the ideology does produce the music eventually I guess.
Thanks. It's always great to have someone with so many...did you study this or do you do this on your own?
I kind of arrived at it. I decided I would start thinking, I don't know, writing about it, I think, writing focuses your thoughts a bit. You learn stuff. You start making connections, you know. I'll tell you when the album comes out and when...
You have something in the world music guide?
Rough Guide To World Music. I'm doing all the Baltic and Nordic section.
Well!
But now I've discovered I've got to do it all over again, I can't believe that! But that'll be out in September now they tell me, it was supposed to be out next month. And I've done that in as much detail as I could, I really really tried terribly hard to get it right. And you can't be in all the countries at once, so you're touching up here and getting bits of information there.

judith@gorge.net

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