Music and the Staged Veillée in Quebec: Performing Tradition by Laura Risk

Fiddlers, step dancers, storytellers, traditional singers, and folklorists staged Montreal’s first veillée in 1919. All that was missing, announced one of the organizers, was a magic carpet to transport the audience into the countryside and a kiss of forgetfulness to erase the woes of modern life.

In Music and the Staged Veillée in Quebec (University of Illinois Press, 2026), Laura Risk tells the story of staged veillées and explores how these commercial performances of idealized rural life became part of Quebec’s cultural heritage. Her in-depth examinations of key performances and recordings follow traditional music and dance from the stage onto radio, records and other audio media, and television. Throughout, Risk documents how staged veillées redefined folklore in twentieth-century Quebec and illuminates how their distinctive framing of traditional musicians and repertoire impacts the performance and reception of the music to the present day.

Laura Risk is an associate professor of music in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a cross-appointment in the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto. Risk’s album Traverse was awarded the 2024 Prix Opus for Album of the Year in the category Traditional Québécois Music.

Music and the Staged Veillée in Quebec is part of the Music in American Life series published by the University of Illinois Press. Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the L. J. and Mary C. Skaggs Folklore Fund.