Cathy Kerst: Hello, I'm Cathy Kerst, folklife specialist and cataloguer in the American Folklife Center. On behalf of the center's staff, I'd like to welcome you to a special presentation in our Benjamin Botkin folklife lecture series. The Botkin series provides a platform for professional folklorists, ethnomusicologists, and ethnographers, working both in the Academy and also in the public sector, to present findings from their ongoing research. This series allows us to interact with cutting-edge scholars in folklife and cultural heritage today, while building our collections here at the library. The lectures are an important acquisitions project for the center. These presentations are videotaped, and become part of our permanent collections in the archive. Often they are also developed into Web casts for the LC Web site. In this way, the Botkin lecture series helps the American Folklife Center fulfill its mandate to "preserve and present cultural scholarship that informs and impacts our world today." Today I have the honor of introducing Jon Dueck. Jonathan Dueck is a visiting assistant professor of ethnomusicology at the University of Maryland at College Park. Prior to this, he taught at the University of Alberta, his alma mater. Jon's research interests center on social identity in music, especially the role of music in religious communities and in religious identity. He has researched Mennonite music in urban Canada, shape-note musical traditions in the U.S., and church music in sub-Saharan Chad. He has published articles on ethnomusicological representation and intellectual property, rap music, Mennonite studies and identity theory, and the social theory of popular music. Today he will be speaking on "Empires, Multiculturalisms, and Borrowed Heart Songs: What Does It Mean to Sing Russian Mennonite Songs?" Please join me in welcoming Jon Dueck. ^M00:02:09 [ Applause ] ^E00:02:16 ^B00:02:26 Jonathan Dueck: It's often said that songs are never new, but always borrowed. But borrowings can be as feeling-full, as meaningful, and as politically important as the real thing. Today I'm going to tell a story of musical borrowings that is also a story of feeling-full investment in society; a fractured, fractal-like story, trying to make sense of my own experience of Russian Mennonite choral music. Let me start, then, with a Russian Mennonite song. It's called "So Nimm Denn Meine Hande" -- "Take Thou My Hand, O Father." ^M00:03:10 [ Music Clip ] ^M00:03:55 [background music] Listen to it. The choir's warm, romantic tone. The tune's gentle but squarely chorale-like motion. The German pietas lyrics with their earnest, simple wish for a divine parent to take my hand and lead me through the world, be it a rapacious, dangerous world, or be it a world of learning and cultivation. When I hear this song, I think of my grandfather's quartet singing in the basement of a church in Steinbach, Manitoba. The heart of the Russian Mennonite East Reserve, where some still speak Mennonite Low German, and make Mennonite foods such as rollkuchen, a German word for a salty fritter eaten as a summer feast with watermelon, which we, following the Russians, called rebuzen [spelled phonetically]. I remember learning to sing "So Nimm Denn Meine Hande" in the Mennonite collegiate institute chamber choir, and traveling on warm, late spring weekends to the churches that dot the flat, fertile black dirt of the Southern Manitoba countryside to sing it. This recording was made of the refined, adult version of such a choir. The acclaimed West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir from British Columbia. This song is part of a special repertoire for Russian Mennonites called "Kernlieder" -- heart, or core songs; songs that, the name suggests, sing the essence of the Russian Mennonite experience. But what does it mean for me to say that this song is Russian Mennonite? What is Russian about this apparently German song? And what might be Russian about my apparently Canadian Mennonites? And just as complex a question, what is Mennonite about them? To ask these questions is to open the door to a complicated set of stories, which are wrapped around and about these songs, placing the Mennonites in not one, but many parallel histories, and traversing not one, but many identities. I'm going to touch on several such stories, beginning each story with my own reflections on a song recorded by the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir, and then exploring historical and literary contexts for the making and reception of each song. First, though, I need to give credit where credit is due, and request my share of the blame. My discussion of the political dimensions of the Mennonite's story in Russia, and later Canada, draws especially on the work of anthropologist James Urry. The strands of story concerning Mennonite choral music-making I draw from musicologist Wesley Berg, and my understandings of Mennonite music-making as a folk practice follow ethnomusicologist and folklorist Doreen Klassen. The credit for many insights I offer here ought in large part to go to Urry, Berg, and Klassen. What is new is my auto-ethnographic weave of the work of these scholars with that of Mennonite novelists, poets, and singers. Let me be clear: in presenting you with that story -- that I intend to be understood as such -- made of works that I read not only as history but as literature, a fiction of fictions. By drawing them together, I'm trying to present you with what I, and I think many other Mennonites, experience as tradition. By placing the fractures and problems in these fictions in a performed narrative of my own, an overarching fiction, I'm trying to draw our attention to the reality of feeling like a subject of a tradition, even in the fact of problems in that tradition. Or maybe even the reality of subjective feelings that draw directly on the problematic moments of encountering and borrowing from the outside world, in a tradition. One more caveat: there are many kinds of Mennonites, but I am only discussing Russian Mennonites here. Not the other major ethnic Mennonite group, the Swiss Mennonites, nor the tremendous flowering of mission-origin Mennonite churches in North America, Asia, and Africa, nor the many Anabaptist cousins of Mennonites, like Hutterites, Amish, Church of the Brethren and so forth. I am exploring diversity within a small Mennonite subgroup here; limiting, but also I hope deepening the story. As a Low German joker Armin Wiebe might say, now that my seat of knowledge is well covered -- [laughter] -- let's talk about the music. The warm personal associations I shared with you concerning "So Nimm Denn Meine Hande," eliding family, cultivation of the land, and insider institutions, places of learning and progress within tradition, give us one starting point for a Mennonite story. As I've noted, I learned "So Nimm Denn Meine Hande" as a student at the Mennonite Collegiate Institute, the oldest Mennonite school in Canada. The song is well-known to many connected with this school. When the school opened in 1890, it taught in German, training Mennonite teachers who staffed new German-language public schools serving the recently arrived Mennonites of Manitoba. From its very beginning, it also offered training in choral music, in part at the behest of H. H. Ewert, a Prussian Mennonite from Kansas who served as the school's first principal. This pattern of building insider institutions in the midst of a large mainstream society, and of linked institutional and musical progress, is not new to Canada, but was established in Russia. When Mennonites first traveled from Prussia to Russia in 1789, they did not know that they were entering a land where, as Urry points out, rational change and progress were fast becoming the rule. These Mennonites, like many other new colonists, responding to Catherine the Great's manifestos of the 1760s, they came for land, and for the Empress' promise that they, as pacifists, would never have to serve in the military, a promise further established in a privilegium granted by Czar Paul in 1800. But the Mennonites did not simply transplant their farms to what was then "New Russia," now Ukraine. Instead, they became something new: model colonists, shaped by Russian officialdom in their institutional and agricultural development. The Russian Board of State Economy Guardianship of Foreigners and Rural Husbandry, formed in 1797, directed the Mennonites to try new crops and planting techniques. The Russian government encouraged the establishment of the first Russian Mennonite Secondary School in 1822, in Ohrloff, a village in the colony of Molotschna. As Mennonites, shaped by these and other modernizing policies, became increasingly prosperous farmers, and later industrialists, they were held up as examples to neighbors, and even used to teach others modern ways of farming and working. Urry relates the story of P.D. Kiselyov, Russian Minister of State Domains in 1841, who inspected several Bessarabian German colonist settlements, and threatened the colonists that if their work did not improve, he would replace their mayors with Mennonites. You can imagine what kind of friends this model colonist status might win. Now, music was a central part of the modernization of Mennonite education. In 1846, Mennonite schools began teaching "Ziffern," a solfege, or do-re-mi system. They system had been adopted a decade earlier by a schoolteacher named Heinrich Franz, who intended to modernize singing among the Mennonites, departing from their old way of lining out hymns, in which a leader began with a florid, ornamented melody, and the congregation responded with their own version of it. Instead, Mennonites would adopt rational, ordered part singing from a score precise in both meter and pitch. Franz wrote that "The holy art of singing had lost much of its beauty, clarity, and correctness," and he wanted to return singing to this pure state "first in my school, and through it, in the church services of the congregation." This quotation is from the introduction to Franz's collection of Dutch and German chorales, already borrowed by earlier Mennonites, now set in Ziffern. Franz's book became an influential source for future Mennonite hymnals. While some Mennonites even today sing in the old way, most modernized along the trajectory Franz laid out. And so, musical and institutional progress became inextricably associated with insider-oriented but outside-influenced communal life in the 19th century Russian Mennonite context. And I hope these bonds are still evident in the associative, personal reading I offered of "So Nimm Denn Meine Hande." So what accounts, then, for the German pietas text and the chorale-like melody of that Russian Mennonite song? Nineteenth century Mennonites were subject to contrary pressures, from inside and out, both to Russify, and to remain separate. James Urry argues that the Mennonites model colonist status functioned through differentiation, through the work of both Russian officials and insider/outside leaders like the so-called "Mennonite Czar" Johann Cornies, the Mennonites became an identifiably different and experimental group, which as such could be held up as an example, or used as a teaching tool for others. Now Mennonites were first classified by the Russian government as "Mennonite colonists," not "Germans," but during the 1870s, popular Russian sentiments about Germans soured as Germany became a more apparent rival. During this time, some Mennonites began to self-identify as a "little people of Russia," drawing on the logic of ethnic and not religious classification available to them within the empire. These Mennonites, who, in fact, for the most part had originated in the Netherlands, began to become "Russian Germans," loyal but ethnic subjects of the Russian Empire. But Mennonites also connected with other German-speaking Russians, including Baltic Germans and colonists, through popular pietism. A new Mennonite group, the Mennonite Brethren, formed through a schism in 1860. Some 18 members of this nascent denomination signed a document, in effect banning from their congregation the mainline [German] Mennonite church, en masse. The Brethren, closely tied to the German Baptists in Russia, moved quickly from the old way of singing in church to four-part pietist hymnity led not by an individual, but by a choir. In the late-19th century, institutions arose supporting this new tradition of church choirs: saengerfests, where regional choirs sang together; and dirigenten kursus, where leaders learned choral conducting skills. The Christlicher Saengerbund, a church-related German singing society, provided leadership and a far-flung geographic network for these new institutions. And so songs such as "So Nimm Denn Meine Hande," written by a German-speaking Estonian woman, made their way into the Mennonite repertory. Many of these songs were translated American gospel hymns, even more tenuously German in provenance. The German-ness of the of the Kernlieder repertory, in other words, was forged for and articulated by Mennonites in Russia, not in Germany. But there is another aspect to the Kernlieder that I want to mention here. Tony Funk, the director of the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir, noted this in the liner notes of the recording I played earlier: "When in the Ukraine Mennonites adopted the songs, they encoded into them their experiences of community, revival, persecution, and homelessness." Funk's statement points to another dimension of Mennonite engagement with the Kernlieder. The Kernlieder are one way in which Mennonites remember that from the perspective of many Mennonites, they were persecuted, and driven from Russia, which was their beloved home. Another Kernliede [spelled phonetically], which embodies this version of the Mennonites story, is "Wehrlos und Verlassen" - "In the Rifted Rock." ^M00:17:10 [ Music clip ] ^M00:17:58 This song's lullaby-like melody rocks us gently, and the text imagines a blessed refuge, from a world defined not by learning and cultivation, but by terror and violence. "There, no enemies can harm me while within the cleft I hide." Some Mennonites moved from Russia to North America in 1874, seeking land, which on the colonies had rapidly disappeared because each family's land in its entirety was always inherited by the oldest child. Mennonites also sought freedom from new policies requiring Mennonites to perform alternative state service. Some migr s cited not only these concerns, but also the unwelcome adoption of France's notation system in Mennonite schools. [laughter] Mennonites call this 19th century group of migr s "Kanadier," or Canadians. Most Mennonites, however, remained in Russia, and became more integrated into Russian society, developing a professional class, educated in Russian institutions of higher education, encouraged by Russian government stipends, teaching and learning Russian in all Mennonite schools, performing state forestry and military medical service. Mennonite choral music also continued to modernize, as Mennonites performed oratorios, and other large, complex works. Mennonites used increasingly nationalist language at this time, describing Russia their "fatherland," and singing and performing Russian nationalist songs. But as Mennonites Russified -- some reluctantly, others eagerly -- their differences from their neighbors in terms of both class and ethnicity began to matter. In 1905, Mennonite farms were among those burned and attacked in a wave of populist violence against privileged landowners. In that same year, there were also many pogroms against Russian Jews, but as James Urry points out, these pogroms were motivated by racism and religious discrimination, not class difference. In 1914 to 15, laws were passed threatening the expropriation of all German land holdings. At the same time, many Mennonite young men were away, serving with the Russian army as medical orderlies under a newly established body, the all-Russia Zemsfta [spelled phonetically] Union. Land holding liquidation, however, was not uniformly enforced, and few Mennonites suffered. When the Russian Revolution began, Red Army, White Army, and the Ukrainian Anarchists' Black Army led by Nestor Makhno, vied for control of South Russia. The battle fronts moved through Mennonite areas frequently, each group demanding food and shelter from the Mennonites. When Germany took Ukraine after the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, Mennonites who had recently been singing songs like "God Save the Czar" assembled at the train station to sing "Deutschland, Deutschland, Uber Alles" as the Germans arrived. The Germans classified Mennonites as privileged Folks-Deutsch, and even armed and trained the formerly pacifist Mennonites against the threat of the Mahknovites. But in classifying the Mennonites as such, and departing, they reinforced the identification of Mennonites with a foreign enemy in the Ukrainian context. Commentator of the time reflected that Mennonites might have been better off refusing this brief aid. The Germans soon departed, having restocked their army's larders, and Mahknovite troops destroyed Mennonite colonies and estates, often killing the men and raping the women. D. H. Neufeld, a diary of this time describes a remarkable journey. Neufeld begins in 1919 with his new job teaching at a Mennonite school. He reflects on the beauty of the land, and the Russian Mennonite settlement in it. Later, he notices the commonality between Mennonites and others who suffer during the revolution, including his antagonists, noting that one Mahknovite comes to his door to ask for bread. Neufeld writes, "He had no choice. It was either join or be shot. Poor young man. He was a victim of circumstances, and are we not all largely the product of circumstances." But as the military occupation of his village wears on, violence, deprivation, and typhoid epidemic spread by unquarantined Mahknovite soldiers takes the life of many. Music plays as we move between Russian and Russian-German identities in Neufeld's story. When bandits occupy a Mennonite house, they roughly ask a girl to play them some music. She sits at the piano and begins to play a piece by Bach. The bandits, disgusted, tell her to stop and demand a dance tune, but she refuses, claiming not even to know any. After less than one year, a depressed Neufeld concludes, "We Mennonites are aliens in this land. If we didn't realize that fact before the war, we've had it forced upon us during and after the war. Our Russian neighbors look at us as the damned Nyntzi [spelled phonetically], Germans who have risen to great prosperity in their land. They completely ignore the fact that our forefathers were invited here 130 years ago in order to cultivate the vast steppes, which lay idle at the time." The translator of Neufeld's diaries, Al Reimer, offers us another view of this period in his novel, My Harp is Turned to Mourning. Reimer charts the course of two brothers, Wilhelm and Nikolai, who come of age just as the Russian Revolution begins. Various forces draw them both into Russian society: Willy into bourgeois Russian circles, attending art school in St. Petersburg where he hears beautiful Russian operas and choral music; the disaffected Kolya into the impoverished masses, joining increasingly radical military splinter groups. In a neat reversal of Neufeld's journey, Reimer presents his characters as becoming Russian through the war. Elder Lep [spelled phonetically], a Mennonite preacher in the novel reflects, "The most Russian things that have ever happened to us in this country over a century are the destruction and violence we have suffered since the Revolution. The bullets and sabers that have pierced our flesh have made us Russian finally. We have shed blood for our motherland, become God's reluctant martyrs of the sword." When Willy leaves Russia for Canada, Mennonite hymns resound on the train, and as he exits the country guards take his secular books away, but let him retain his hymnals and the Bible, the songs a bridge to the Mennonite commonwealth in Russia's past. Whether we remember them as innocent victims or overprivileged Nynzi, from the beginning of the Soviet era to 1929 this generation of Mennonites immigrated to Canada, especially the prairie provinces, en masse. Mennonites called this large wave of immigrants the Russl nder. So arrived many Mennonite song leaders, who like Willy received higher education in Russian and European schools. These song leaders were central to the continuation of saengerfests and conductors workshops on the Canadian prairies. Russl nder immigrants established their own administrative bodies, extending Czarist-era Russian Mennonite colonial self-government structures into the new world. The Russl nder also established immigrantin chor, choirs composed entirely of Russl nder immigrants, who it should be remembered were largely literate in Ziffern and not standard notation. With the rise of Nazism, and the advent of World War II, a very few Russl nder secretly hoped for a Nazi victory, which might have allowed them to return to Ukraine. But with the defeat of Germany many Russl nder adopted what James Urry has argued is a memorial relationship to Russia, engaging in what Jeffery Alexander might call a trauma creation process, where a varied historical experience is represented to insiders and then others as a watershed, a trauma for the whole group, a cut or tear in a collective memory, a piece of the past that substitutes for the present and helps create a group identity. Mennonite historians wrote about colonial life, but not contemporary Russia. Mennonites began to sponsor history tours of Ukraine in the 1970s, and Mennonites negotiated the transfer of important historical monuments from the former Mennonite Commonwealth to Steinbach, Manitoba. And as Tony Funk's comments in his liner notes suggest, Kernlieder became associated for some Mennonites with the trauma of the Russl nder experience. Evidencing and strengthening this connection in 1983, a film dramatizing this Mennonite exodus story called "And When They Shall Ask," appeared, the score of which included many Kernlieder melodies. There is a postscript. Many Mennonites remained in the Soviet Union, unable to emigrate. One memoirist, Harry Loewen, remembers identifying himself as a Soviet of German descent, never hearing the word Mennonite in public. He recalls memorizing the patriotic Russian poem "Katyusha," reproduced in his own translation in his memoirs. He remembers singing Russian folksongs and German hymns at home. But in 1937 both his father and grandfather were taken to prison, never to return, and in 1943 he and his mother fled West, and eventually emigrated to Canada. It wasn't until the year 2000 that Loewen learned, through the release of regional prison files in Ukraine, that both his father and grandfather had been falsely accused of crimes against the state, tortured, and executed. They were posthumously exonerated of their crimes in 1989. He wrote, "I broke down and wept, something I don't do easily. After 63 years it still hurt almost as much as if it had just happened." ^M00:28:12 [Pause] ^M00:28:27 Justina Martens, another memoirist, remembers a worship service in her youth, during which she was advised to memorize scripture and hymnities, since "the time will come when you will only possess what you have memorized." Justina did so. As German troops pressed into Ukraine, Justina and many other Mennonites were deported to Kazakhstan. The hymns Justina memorized became what Carol Ann Muller might call "inalienable possessions," reconstituted in informal evening get-togethers with other deportees who shared Justina's poverty and insecurity. Friends sang hymns with her as her niece died of malnutrition, and then Kernlieder together at a desperately poor Christmas celebration in the mid-1940s. ^M00:29:12 [sings] O have you not heard of that beautiful stream That flows through the promised land? It's waters gleam bright in the heavenly light and ripple o'er golden sand. O seek that beautiful stream O seek that beautiful stream It's waters so free a-flowing for thee O seek that beautiful stream. ^M00:29:53 Justina eventually emigrated to Germany, teaching her stories and songs to her grandchildren. Her now-German Mennonites still sing Kernlieder today. I attended a conference in Toronto in 1999 on the Soviet Mennonite experience and suffering. And at its close, I was asked to sing "In the Rifted Rock." I began to sing the melody alone, but within minutes everyone within the room began to fill in the harmonies, first softly, then strongly, as we remembered together. It was a profoundly moving experience, but at the same time some of those in the room, myself included, were not of the Soviet generation, nor were we their children. My experience fits with Urry's observation that the Russl nder in Canada, and not the Soviet generation, have been the leaders in memorializing the Russian Mennonite experience. The appropriation of Soviet Mennonite stories, and the investment of songs with the nostalgic and tragic meanings of those stories, is a Canadian project. All of these stories I've told so far resonate most strongly with various groups of Mennonite insiders, but in Canada an outside might associate Mennonite musicians most closely with, simply, choral and vocal Western art music, especially German Romantic and Baroque music. Mennonite choral singers are frequently part of Canadian professional choruses, and even the host of the national CBC Radio's choral music programs is a Mennonite, Howard Dick. And well-known Mennonite opera singers have appeared, the most iconic being tenor Ben Heppner, whose face beams at me from the pages of Opera News as I walk down the hall of the school of music where I work, here in Maryland. Heppner and others have sung with the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir, my musical foil today. It is this classical choral tradition of which the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir's recordings are most clearly a part. Listen, for example, to this Schutz motet: ^M00:32:07 [ Music Clip ] ^M00:32:47 This classical music tradition might be considered a continuation, or even the flowering of the saengerfest's choral tradition begun in Russia. While James Urry placed 1944 as the year in which Russl nder Mennonites turned to the trauma of their past, for musicologist Wesley Berg 1945 was the year in which Mennonites, building on the saengerfest tradition, turned outward and moved forward in the world of Western art music. In that year, a music department was established in a new Mennonite college in Winnipeg, followed by a second college and music department in 1947. These two college music departments' early leaders included Ben Horch and George Wiebe, vital saengerfest leaders who also produced large-scale concert performances of sacred choral and vocal music at the colleges. Wiebe wrote his DMA thesis on the choral music of Heinrich Schtz, which became part of the college choral repertoire that I inherited as a student. Singers and conductors trained at these colleges began to occupy faculty posts in other Canadian universities, and Mennonite singing began to be associated with choral professionalism. This close tie between Mennonite college education and musical professionalism is also evident in the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir. The music of the choir circulates as art music on national CBC Radio and on 13 well-received recordings. Tony Funk, the choir's director, teaches at a third Mennonite college in British Columbia. If Canada offered a context in which Mennonites turned outward to Western art music audiences, the Canadian government's policy of multiculturalism in the 1970s offered another kind of outward turn. Doreen Klassen remarked that in multicultural Canada it is "not only acceptable but even desirable to express one's ethnicity." In the 1960s and 70s, the Canadian government encouraged studies that began to classify Canadian ethnicities, and then adopted policies of first biculturalism, and then multiculturalism. It's been convincingly argued that these policies were not only innocent celebration, but also an attempt to relativize Quebec's growing separatist nationalism. These multicultural policies coincided with a flowering of Mennonite folk culture. The government advertised its multiculturalist policy in Mennonite arts periodicals, which began to circulate in the 1970s, and it funded a chair in Mennonite Studies at the University of Winnipeg in the early 1980s. Mennonite novels were written; Mennonite poets, dramatists, actors, and theater troupes emerged; and several Mennonite groups appeared, singing folksongs in Mennonite Low German. Doreen Klassen produced a landmark collection of these songs, in it arguing that in the 1970s Mennonites had experienced a Low Germany renaissance. I learned some of these songs as an elementary school student in the small town of Gretna, from Dennis Rimer [spelled phonetically] -- he's the fellow on the left with the hockey stick base. He was a favorite teacher of mine who was a part of a Low German singing group called Heuschrekes und Wild Honig, or "Locusts and Wild Honey." This song, "Dit Seid - Yant Seide" humorously describes the differences between one friends on "dit seid," or this side of the river -- for Dennis and myself, "dit seid" was Gretna and the West Reserve -- and those who lived on its benighted other side, "yant seide," yan side. ^M00:36:41 [ Music Clip ] ^m00:37:23 Heuschrekes' version of a Kanadier Low German song called "Noba Klosa" [spelled phonetically] -- "My Neighbor of Klassen [spelled phonetically]" -- reminds me of a particularly Canadian logic of ethnicity. While it tells the story of an unfortunate Mennonite bumpkin who can't make heads or tails of industrial mainstream and presumably Anglophone Canadian society, it punctuates each Low German line of its story with the French phrase, "parlez vous". ^m00:37:48 [laughter] ^m00:37:50 [ Music Clip] ^m00:38:19 [Background music] Klassen writes that the song is derived from a borrowed World War I popular song, "Mademoiselle from Armentiere," which also incorporates a punctuating "parlez vous." ^M00:38:30 But Hueschrekes' liner notes present the phrase in Low German orthography, writing "vous" as "wu". [laughter] Mennonite ethnicity in this borrowed song, serendipitously, even accidentally, butts up against the paradigmatic ethnic subject in Canada, the Francophone. Even the cultural geography of Southern Manitoba reminds us of this. Mennonite Gretna nestles next to Manitoba, St. Joseph, and St. John the Baptist; Steinbach to La Broquerie and St. Pierre-Jolys; and the Mennonite mecca of Winnipeg is also home to St. Boniface, one of the largest French-Canadian communities outside of Quebec. My point is that these Low German songs, whether retained from Russia, borrowed in the interim like "Noba Klosa," or newly composed like "Dit Seid - Yant Seide," had a meaning in Canada which they hadn't in Russia; they were a political act of participation in a national cultural economy of multiculturalism. And they are beyond the pale of what is presented by any Canadian Mennonite choir to the best of my knowledge, though many choral Mennonite singers have been delighted to hear and sing these songs in other contexts. One of the main motivations for Doreen Klassen's groundbreaking work was to push Mennonite scholarship, usually singularly and even obsessively interested in Mennonite art music, to recognize this obviously alive-and-kicking Low German folk music tradition. When I moved to the city of Winnipeg to pursue college music studies, I encountered a cadre of Mennonite poets, novelists, and folk and pop singers, many of whom identified themselves as ethnic, but not religious. These voices, central to Canadian Mennonite culture in the 1990s, both continued the proliferation of a Mennonite ethnic folk practice, to which Klassen oriented us, and also unraveled it. Patrick Friesen, a poet famous for his lyrical writing, slipped away from references to martyrdom and Mennonite hymns in a collection written as he left the Mennonite mecca of Winnipeg for Vancouver. Instead, he wrote: I want no one's death but my own the clarity of a struck piano key the fabric of a plucked string I want no other life than this. Kate Friesen -- no close relation of Patrick's -- a Mennonite folk singer, told me this: "I had to go out and write from my own voice, and tell my own story, not as part of a choir, but as my own voice. This is my own story." Voices like these draw on the logic of multiculturalism. They speak from an ethnic position, but treat Mennonite elite classical music and theology as a problematic, constraining totality, a totality that sometimes calls for escape and rupture, even of the ethnic community. I've tried to honor Klassen in my story here by presenting my own experience of choral music as a folk tradition, and not only an elite art discourse, and by treating folk and art culture as equally complicit negotiations between a people group and the structures of power they found themselves in. And now, by arguing that, in any case, no particular practice is a good total representation of Mennonite experience or identity. So it's time to conclude. I promised I would talk about what this assortment of musical objects might have to do with being the subject of a tradition. In telling you these stories, I've been unrolling bits of memory and belief that are attached to these songs and my own person. In thinking through them with you, each song and story I've offered points us to different ways of understanding identity. Stories of Canadian and Russian Mennonite schools and choirs, and "So Nimm Denn Meine Hande," remind us of identity lodged in languages and institutions, of accommodation to and resistance against a mainstream society. Stories of the emergence of Russian German-ness for late-19th century Mennonites, and "In the Rifted Rock," remind us of imagined senses of national identity with very real consequences. Stories of the Russian Revolution and songs remembered point us toward cultural trauma as a touchstone for identity, and stories of art music and Low German songs reminds us of performing ethnicity, which is at once complicit with the multicultural nation and a vital part of the ethnic experience. Each of these points of view presupposes one story that comes to organize the totality of group experience, pointing to an origin, circumscribing a social space. There is nothing particularly wrong with any of these ways of understanding identity for Mennonites, but if I were to adhere to any of them wholeheartedly, I would have to bracket or sideline the others. So I want to offer them an alternate image. The theories I'm alluding to are narrative wholes, internally coherent like maybe a modern novel. But I've tried to juxtapose the broad context of Mennonite songs and stories with my own small, personal experience to suggest that we can imagine these Russian Mennonite stories and songs as more like poems than novels. We can imagine them as fractious, small performative acts, and fractious, small cultural objects, tracing their line through the big canvas of history and society. I propose the term artifact to describe this way of imaging the musical object. I like it because of its poetic resonances; artifacts are things that are made, they are also the evidence of a desired and illusory effect of artifice, and they endure. Imagined as an artifact, a Mennonite kernliede is not pure, not sprung up from the soil as its name might suggest, but is made of borrowed materials at hand in an historical situation. Its meaning is not inherent, but its construction allows it to refract like a prism the broad context of a communities cultural life in specific historical places. And like a prism, it continues to reflect that communal life within itself when that historical context is gone, at least for a time. Imagined as an artifact, a kernliede is not a totality, and the collection of writings that the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir and recordings that the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir has made is not a totality either, it is a motley bunch of songs, including alongside Kernlieder: British choral music, Christian popular music, Brahms and so forth, songs that Canadian Mennonite choral singers have come across and borrowed. And the subject, the eye of a tradition to which such a collection of musical objects speak is not total, not pure, not internally coherent in its subjectivity. It is not only an ethnic or religious subjectivity, it is not a subjectivity that can be imagined in terms of one historical story. It is irreconcilably multiple in its multiple sites of investment in social life, through performative acts such as singing, and the objective forms of such acts, such as songs. It's unity is a unity of the speaking, singing, body, as Mennonite poet Julia Kasdorf might put it. I want to end by playing one more recording of the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir, singing a piece that has become common in Mennonite choirs: the "Rachmaninoff Vespers". ^M00:46:46 [ Music clip ] ^M00:47:30 When I hear this song, I remember singing the Vespers in 2001, at 5:00 in the morning, where the University Chamber Choir, conducted by a Russian Mennonite, alongside other Mennonite singers, together with the Edmonton Ukrainian Male Chorus. We sang it together as the sun rose to celebrate the coincidence, that morning, of the Orthodox and Western Easter. ^M00:47:59 [ Applause ] ^M00:48:10 Female Speaker: You weren't singing it in Church Slavonic? ^M00:48:16 Jonathan Dueck: No, they sing it in English. Female Speaker: They sing it in English? That's interesting. [Inaudible], I'm just curious. ^M00:48:25 Jonathan Dueck: It -- they do sing -- the West Coast -- this was a decision on the part of the West Coast Mennonite Chamber Choir. I've sung the piece in other Mennonite contexts in Church Slavonic, and we did sing it in Church Slavonic on that morning at 5:00 AM. However, this choir didn't. But they make all kinds of decisions like that. When they present Kernlieder, for example, they're also negotiating with an Anglo center, I would say, of Mennonite musical practice, and they express that decision by performing some verses in German and some verses in English. So I think it's actually a very similar tactic that they use. Female Speaker: What was the name of that film about the Soviet Mennonites? Jonathan Dueck: "And When They Shall Ask," and it's really about the revolution, about the period just coming up to the Soviet period, not quite Soviet Russia. There isn't a film that I know of about that period, but that story is beginning now be told, since just recently the archives have opened up so that people can go back and find these stories of a lost generation. ^M00:49:30 Male Speaker: These people lived [inaudible] to what has become known as the central code [spelled phonetically] of the Germans; at one time, lived in Russia, [inaudible] by Catherine the Great, and then eventually left Russia. Some settled back in Germany and came, ultimately, to the U.S. I know [inaudible] other ancestry. Jonathan Dueck: Yes, there are. Male Speaker: -- flanked [spelled phonetically] by religion, [inaudible] Germans speak mostly [inaudible]. ^M00:50:09 Jonathan Dueck: There are certainly Russian Germans who came to the American plains and Canadian prairies, just like the Russian Mennonites did. They came at the same times, they were classified as German colonists, and they lived nearby Mennonite, and so the map I showed showing Mennonite and German settlements shows that they were in close proximity to each other, and they even shared institutions like the Christlicher Saengerbund, but there wasn't a great deal, as far as I know of, say, marriage and other close connections between those communities. But they certainly were in a similar position, and they did move to a similar place in North America, at around the same times, for the same pressures. So they share a lot. ^E00:50:46 ^B00:50:56 Cathy Kerst: If there are no more questions, please give Jon a round of applause, please. ^M00:51:03 [Applause] Thank you very much. ^M00:51:06 [ Music ]