Post-competition culture. Photo by Lois Siegel.

The jam started when a couple dozen of the best fiddlers in the country met up at the pub, ordered some beers and started playing until management locked the doors for the night. I didn’t hear about it until now because I, like the rest of Ottawa’s media, didn’t pay much attention to the competition.

Lois Siegel said the night was raucous, and fun, not a surprise considering the bowers included two-time national champion Julie Fitzgerald and Calvin Vollrath, one of the best in the world and composer of five songs for the Opening Ceremonies at Vancouver’s Winter Olympics.

Very few others heard of the championships as well, apparently lost in end-of-summer zombieland and the upcoming bail hearings of Ottawa’s terrorist suspects. That’s a pity because fiddling is to Canadian music the way The Prairies are to our culture: integral to identity yet marginalized in notoriety.

Every seat in the Shenkman auditorium was full for the finals; the audience was from across North America; and the top three winners were all under 40. But the days of Ottawa Valley icon Don Messer are gone, and Natalie MacMaster and Ashley MacIsaac, while still active, are not doing what it takes to be sullen celebrities.

Siegel, herself a fiddler, took pictures of the event. She was gobstruck by the quality of the music. But fiddlers aren’t famous people and, Siegel surmises, local media don’t think anyone is interested.

Tens of thousands in Canada disagree. There are hundreds of fiddle associations, competitions and festivals each year. Irish Music Ottawa lists 12 weekly jam sessions for Irish and fiddle music.You can call it a jam or a kitchen caleigh or whatever you want; fiddling thrives on community and in family (like Fitzgerald’s). It’s music for unswollen heads and light feet.

Fiddlers share an image with curlers. There’s money and fame at the very, very top, but that rarely seems to be the purpose. Letting the rosin flow into the culture is. It’s also one of the roots of this country’s multiculturalism – Cape Breton, Quebec, First Nations, rural Ontario, Manitoba, Saskatchewan, the Northwest Territories and a dozen other pockets have all been linked for centuries by it.

Those in the sector say fiddling dropped in popularity in the 1970s but is regaining strength. But I wonder, because there’s precious little traditional violining in our entertainment today. And that should be an embarrassment for those paid to protect our culture.