FORT KENT – Despite her title, University of Maine at Fort Kent Acadian Archives Director Lisa Ornstein is about more than just managing historic documents.

During a recent interview, Ornstein discussed the unlikely path that led her from her childhood in Connecticut, Illinois and Ohio, to the American Folk Life Center in Washington, D.C., to research work in Quebec to northern Maine’s St. John Valley, where she heads the Acadian Archives at the University of Maine at Fort Kent.

“A star was shining above me, putting me in the right place at the right time,” Ornstein said of the string of lucky encounters and friendships that led to her role in helping to preserve the fiddle traditions of North America’s people of French descent. The music was an integral part of the social fabric of French settlements in Canada and the United States. The Acadian and Quebecois families that populate the St. John Valley in the late 1700s brought the traditions with them when they began to settle the area in the late 1700s.

“This is the type of music nourishes that kind of fortuitous meeting,” she said.

A resident of Fort Kent for more than a decade, Ornstein is passing on the traditional music of French America, crossing the border often to keep up her musical friendships. She said that helping to keep the musical traditions alive is her way of repaying the generosity, patience and kindness that some of North America’s premiere master fiddlers showed her when she was a “snotty nosed teenager” on a quest to learn their tunes and techniques.

Well-known in Quebec both as a fiddler and as an accompanist of traditional songs, Ornstein was among an elite group of expert traditional musicians chosen to record “Hommage a Marius Barbeau,” a collection comprising 28 of the thousands of traditional French-Canadian songs gathered by Barbeau just after the turn of the century. The disc, recently released by the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., was recorded in the studio in which the Montreal Symphony Orchestra records its albums, she said.

The CD project began almost two years ago, when Danielle Martineau, a Canadian folk arts specialist and musician friend of Ornstein’s, set out to produce new settings for 28 songs culled from more than 9,000 traditional French-language ballads collected in Quebec in the early 1900s by pioneer anthropologist Barbeau.

Between 1914 and 1922, Barbeau documented the folk songs, legends and traditional arts of Quebec’s French-speaking people and later popularized the culture through many books and articles.

Barbeau made the original recordings on wax cylinders he carried with him as he peddled his bicycle through the back roads of the St. Lawrence region of Quebec, where traditional life still flourished and radio did not yet exist. The recordings’ poor quality, however, made them difficult to listen to.

“The idea was to try to do justice to these voices from 100 years ago – not embalm them,” Ornstein said of the CBC project. “It was an honor. The studio was like something out of ‘Star Trek.’ It was really an amazing project.”

The 28 ballads chosen for the CD include lullabies, murder ballads, love songs, counting songs, drinking songs and satires, to name a few. The disc comes with an illustrated bilingual booklet featuring the song’s lyrics and the artists’ biographies

In addition to Ornstein’s fiddle playing, the disc features vocalists Eric Beaudry, a founding member of La Galvaude, a group of traditional musicians from Quebec; Andre Marchand, a founding member of La Bottine Souriante, the traditional Quebecois group that performed at last year’s National Folk Festival in Bangor; Lisan Hubert, a singer with roots in the Magdelene Islands; and Danielle Martineau, also the album’s director. Daniel Roy, who plays several instruments, also performs on several songs.

According to the disc’s liner notes, the songs display varied and ancient musical modes that reflected a traditional way of life spanning centuries, a lifestyle anchored in family and community living. Some of the songs date back to the Middle Ages.

As Ornstein sees it, however, the songs also provided a state of suspended belief that allowed messages to be conveyed that could not be said aloud.

“The songs are about murder, love, sarcasm, loneliness – universal, timeless themes. Some have sly innuendo and double entendres while some are meant to titillate. Some were cautionary tales because these were things that could happen. You could talk about stuff [in songs] that otherwise couldn’t be talked about, like sex and domestic abuse.”

Not surprisingly, Ornstein grew up in a musical family. Born in Connecticut and raised in Illinois and Ohio, her childhood years were filled with Renaissance and Baroque music. Her mother, Doris Ornstein, played harpsichord professionally and taught at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Ornstein began playing violin at age 9 and took up traditional music as a teenager.

“It was a major revelation to me that not everyone’s mom had a harpsichord,” she said. “It was my mom who was my world of music. I would fall asleep to her figuring out ornamentation (the personal touches individual musicians bring to written classical music). I thought music was something you did mostly at home and played in small groups.”

Fiddle and violin music are played on the same instrument, which arose around 1550 in Italy and France. The two styles, however, have dramatically different techniques and traditions, she said.

“It’s the way you learn and the circumstances in which it’s played and how the music is passed on,” she said. Fiddle players generally learn by ear and from one another.

“Fiddling is usually passed down along male lines,” she noted. “The woman’s world was the home, while fiddle was a very social art.”

Violinists take formal lessons, read notes and employ techniques associated with classical violin, she said. “They do not improvise,” she said. “You had to play just the notes that were on the page.”

“That whole trip just didn’t appeal to me,” she said. One day in the 1960s, a banjo-playing uncle played an old archival recording of American “old time” fiddle music. The music’s effect on Ornstein was immediate and profound. She was encouraged to pursue it by her parents, who arranged for her to spend the summer at age 17 as a volunteer at the Library of Congress’ American Folk Life Center.

While there, she met the family of Franco-American fiddler Louis Beaudoin at Wolf Trap Farm Park in northern Virginia. Beaudoin was there representing Vermont at a national traditional music event. She had listened to recordings of his fiddling at the folk life center and some musician friends had smuggled her into the artists’ dorm area. Beaudoin, who lived first in Lowell, Mass., and then in the Burlington, Vt., area, had musical roots in Quebec.

“There was the tune that he played (‘Reel de Gaspe’) that I couldn’t get out of my head,” she recalled. “I was trying to remember the tune and who walks in but Mr. Beaudoin,” she said. “There was this instant click.”

The Beaudoins became a second family to Ornstein. “They had five daughters – including a Lisa,” she said. “All either played piano or step-danced. I became like the sixth daughter of the family.”

When she was 22, she landed a fellowship to study fiddle traditions in Quebec City. Off she went in 1978 with her fiddle tucked under her arm. It was the late 1970s, at the height of the folk revival of that time. The Parti Quebecois had just come into power and the Franco pride movement was under way.

“It was like this crash course. I went to Quebec. I didn’t know anybody. I didn’t know much French but I was not afraid. My passport was the language of music and Mr. Beaudoin’s tunes,” she said. She planned to stay for six months but ended up staying 12 more years.

When she first arrived, she spent most days in the archives at Laval University, staying from the time it opened to closing time. One of her few laments was that she couldn’t find anyone her own age to play with.

One summer day, friends encouraged Ornstein to attend a music festival, where La Bottine Souriante was playing. From the audience, she spotted a musician friend playing. “And didn’t he see me,” she said with a laugh. He pulled her up on stage where she played for a while. She later crossed the public square to get a beer at a popular bar there.

“I heard fiddle music and sure enough there’s a group of young guys,” she said. “So I just took out my fiddle and one of the guys recognized me from [her stage performance earlier.] We played all night long – we closed several bars.”

Before long, she was invited to join, becoming La Bottine’s only woman member ever and spent eight months playing gigs at bars, colleges and festivals. “I was getting to see this from the inside out,” she said. The band’s members remain very good friends.

Wanting to stay in Quebec after her fellowship ended, Ornstein enrolled in graduate school. She chose as her thesis a study of the life of Louis Boudreau, a fiddler of Acadian descent. The thesis included a musical genealogy of Boudreau’s family, which included piano and harmonica players, fiddlers, step dancers and singers.

In the early 1990s, Ornstein came to Maine to take the helm of UMFK’s Acadian Archives, a role that requires her to draw upon much of what she learned in Quebec. She remains committed to passing on traditional fiddling music and its unique techniques. One means for doing so is the classes she has been teaching for pupils at Fort Kent Elementary School – classes that proved so popular that she now training others to teach the skill.

“People here love fiddle music. Of that I have no doubt,” she said, noting that the Fort Kent’s community cable channel plays video recordings of local fiddle performances “incessantly. People come up to me in the grocery store and say, ‘Aren’t you the lady who plays the fiddle?’ ”

Though fiddle playing is not nearly as prevalent here as it was in earlier times, Ornstein isn’t ready to pronounce it dead.

“You could argue that it’s lost,” she said. “The love is there, but people don’t visit the way they used to and the radio and TV have changed entertainment.”

She said, however, “These hand-me-down arts testify to the richness of the cultural lives of a people. Some [of these traditional arts] seem to be able to traverse the changes, to survive in an era of cultural gray out,” Ornstein said. “Many are struggling to survive but it isn’t a hopeless situation as long as there’s one person left to pass the tradition along. You just need to do something. Don’t wait.”

The CD featuring selections from Barbeau’s collection can be ordered through CBC’s online store at www.cbcrecords.ca.