SARANAC LAKE — Saws sang. People wielding spuds smashed them into the ice. Blocks of ice floated listlessly in Lake Flower’s Pontiac Bay in the shadow of the Saranac Waterfront Lodge. To musician Gretchen Koehler’s fiddler’s ear, the noisy work of the Ice Palace Workers 101 was “musical.”
On Tuesday, Koehler and her husband Joel Foisy, of Potsdam, bundled up to document the process of the IPW building the Saranac Lake Winter Carnival Ice Palace with photos and video. It’s that cold, hard work that is inspiring a fiddle tune on ice harvesting she is composing.
THE ICE HARVEST
This tune, named “The Ice Harvest” is part of an ongoing project, a musical suite called “Fiddling with Traditions” full of fiddle tunes inspired by North Country traditions. Koehler said the photos and video she gathered this week will be part of music videos and multimedia concert performances she’s bringing to North Country opera houses and classrooms, and that the icy energy she witnessed here this week will inform her style of play.
Koehler had already written the “rough sketch” of the tune based on her research of the tradition, which included interviewing people, reading books and watching footage of ice cutting. But being out on the ice on Tuesday made it “real,” she added, and will affect the arrangement of the tune.
“I watch their hands and their work movements and anything that I can translate into my fiddle hands and turn into music,” Koehler said.
She gets excited talking about putting that feeling into the composition. Her primary language, she said, is the fiddle.
The deep cuts made with six-foot hand saws translate to long and energetic bow strokes.
“When they release the ice blocks, how they float in the water. That’s very musical,” Koehler said.
A DRIVING REEL
When four men at a time slam their spuds into the cracks in the ice, breaking the blocks free from the ice field, is a “very musical” moment, too.
“They’re literally going ‘One, two, three, BOOM!’ That’s a reel,” Koehler said, referencing the musical term “reel,” which is a 4/4 time Irish fiddle dance style. “That’s not a sweet old time waltz. That’s a driving reel.”
The tune is in the style of an old time square dance reel, she said.
It will sound different than the other famous song inspired by ice cutting — “Frozen Heart” from the opening scene of the movie “Frozen.” This Disney song is more of a moody chant with a droning, pounding sound.
Koehler said her goal with these tunes is to look at where traditions were in the past and where they are today.
“I interviewed my in-laws who remember what it was like in the time before everybody had a refrigerator and waiting for the ice truck to go by their house,” Koehler said. “The kids would run after it and want the shavings.”
JOYFUL TRADITION
Ice harvesting has a history of hard work for strictly practical purposes, she said, but now it is a frivolous, joyful tradition. Koehler said she could feel this at the Ice Palace site on Tuesday, sensing clearly what a sense of community the work brought out of everyone involved. This is something she wants to express in the tune.
Koehler will be bringing her performances into fourth grade local history classes throughout St. Lawrence County. In the schools, she’ll tell students all about cutting ice blocks and hopes to spark an interest in the students.
She will also be performing the tune, including the ice harvesting tune, at the Edwards Opera House in Edwards on June 8. The tune will also will be on an album to be released at the end of the year. Koehler’s “Fiddling with Traditions” tunes have been featured on WPBS’s “Inside the Story.”
With the other Adirondack traditions she’s covered, she usually meets the artists and gets her footage. But with ice harvesting, she couldn’t do it just anytime. The ice decided when she filmed. Koehler also has historic ice-cutting photographs from her grandfather and from Saranac Lake- based writer and IPW member Tom French.
Her fiddle is 300 years old — too old to bring into the bitter cold, so she plans to return to the palace site in the summer and film parts of the music video at the same spot.
Koehler started writing this suite of music two years ago after getting a $10,000 grant from the state Council on the Arts, with a focus on folk art — like blacksmithing, quilting, woodworking and paper making. She’s expanded it more this year working with the Canton-based nonprofit Traditional Arts in Upstate NY, or TAUNY, with a focus on North Country food traditions — beekeeping, maple sugaring, bread making and ice harvesting.
Koehler said up until this week, dressing in the beekeeper getup was the most exhilarating part of the process. But after getting out on the ice and “feeling like a total badass” she said ice harvesting got her adrenaline pumping. She said she can’t wait to return to Saranac Lake to see the final product during Winter Carnival — Feb. 2 to 11.