TMU Professor Peter Johnston lives and breathes music both in his everyday life and as an academic researcher.
Music connects us to the world, its people and its history, he argues. This connection drives his teaching at TMU.
As a musician and scholar of ethnomusicology the study of music as a social practice and cultural phenomenon Johnston spends most of his time studying and producing various genres of music.
In the classroom, he examines the harmonies and dissonances of musical traditions across cultural and national borders.
Music is a cultural bridge
In his course, Music of World Cultures, Johnston immerses his students in forms of traditional, pre-industrial music from around the world.
For many diasporic communities, music serves as a cultural bridge. Their connection to home lives on through musical traditions carried from place to place and generation to generation.
Like people, music changes as it moves. Johnston traces this phenomenon in his teaching and research.
"Wherever humans go either in willing or forced migration, we tend to take three things with us: language, religion and music. And wherever these three things take root, they are changed to suit the local conditions."
TMU music and philosophy professor Peter Johnston
Johnston's latest project reveals how this musical evolution works in practice. Working with Maritime musicians Màiri Morrison and Alasdair Roberts, he created an album called Remembered In Exile: Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia.
The album uncovers a time capsule of Scottish culture, music and folklore embedded in Nova Scotia's shores. Through generations of preservation, these musical traditions and Gaelic lyrics developed regional variations, sustained by diasporic Scots in Canada.
The project explores how Scottish folkloric tradition survived and changed over time. More broadly, it speaks to how diasporic groups use tradition to keep history alive, and how culture inevitably changes in exile.
Above, "The Bonny House of Airlie" is a track from the Màiri Morrison and Alasdair Roberts LP, "Remembered in Exile: Songs and Ballads from Nova Scotia".
Preserving forgotten voices
Remembered in Exile features traditional songs with Scottish roots collected in Maritime Canada by folklorist Helen Creighton (1899-1989).
"The songs on Remembered in Exile have their roots in Scotland, but were transformed over the distance and centuries by the people who brought them to Eastern Canada," remarked Johnston.
His team researched Creighton's collection at the Nova Scotia archives to find 10 songs that their Scottish collaborators recognized-but had been changed enough to be called Canadian' versions.
The album features the delicate interlacing of Gaelic words and lyrics. While many Gaelic words, songs and dances have been preserved in the region, nearly been forgotten in their Scottish homeland, the language remains a linguistic minority in Nova Scotia.
Revitalizing the Gaelic language
Johnston's research reveals the urgent need to preserve endangered languages. He met 90-year-old Annag MacKinnon, who was punished as a child for speaking Gaelic in school.
With few remaining native speakers, younger people are making efforts to revitalize the language. Many Scottish Gaelic scholars travel to Cape Breton to uncover fragments of their lost culture.
"This was Màiri's experience," Johnston shared, "and it was fascinating to listen to her talk with a Gaelic elder it was truly one of the most beautiful and profound things I have ever experienced."
Universal stories of exile
The title of the album Remembered in Exile speaks to the experience of Gaels who were "exiled across the ocean from their home, and then exiled from opportunity in Nova Scotia until they learned English and assimilated," explained Johnston.
More profoundly, it captures the widespread experience of cultural and linguistic loss.
"In my Music of World Cultures class, these stories of forced migrations and attempts to maintain or destroy minority cultures are repeated all around the world," says Johnston. "This includes the Roma people in Spain, with roots in India, to the Maroons in Jamaica who preserved African customs and culture in a way no other Black community was able to do in the Americas."
Johnston's work shows the loss of language and culture by forced displacement, colonization or migration, lasts for generations. In these silences, familiar tunes and old lyrics may reveal fragments of forgotten histories.
