Nowadays, there are several filk-only conventions held around the world. The largest, the Ohio Valley Filk Festival, held in Dublin, Ohio (near Columbus), in October, draws 400 people annually. The rotating Northeast-based convention, NEFilk, is called ConCertino in years when it is MASSFILC’s turn to host. (Its other three iterations are Conterpoint, Contata, and ConCerto. This year, it’s Contata 5, and will happen in June in Parsippany, New Jersey.)
“As we started gathering at our conventions, we started seeing that we are a culture and we better start acting like it,” says Maguire. To that end, the filk community boasts a mini-recording industry, a robust online musical archive, and a plethora of online message boards. The Internet, filkers say, has helped the community grow not only by facilitating the sharing of music but by helping filkers find their own kind.
“As the community gets bigger you find that there are people who thought nobody else did this,” says Stevko.
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How filkers become filkers varies from filker to filker. For de Montellano, it was being brought up on Gilbert & Sullivan musicals. (It bears mentioning that local filkers remade The Mikado as The Filkado for Boston’s 2004 hosting of the World Science Fiction Convention.) Benjamin Newman, a 29-year-old computer-science grad student at Brandeis, got into filk through the science-fiction club at Swarthmore. It was the nurturing musical environment that drew him in.
“In our society, we do so much less singing together than people used to do,” says Newman, whose songs include “Dragon for Sale” and “Crouching Tiger, Jedi Master.”
“When you’re in a community that affords you the opportunity to do that,” he says, “you get to know people in a pretty close way, and it becomes like family.”
In January, the family received devastating news when it learned that filker Greg MacMullan — an MIT grad and former Boston-area resident who had relocated to Charlottesville, Virginia — had died in a house fire. His widow and stepdaughter attended Boskone this year to spend time with the friends who responded in the wake of MacMullan’s death with condolences, donations, and support.
“As horrible as it is, I think it does remind us how it really is a close community,” says Filker Paul Estin, a 39-year-old teacher at Newton South High School.
De Montellano cites the “heart of filk” as being the open circle, where filkers engage in cooperative music-making. People take turns singing songs — some with instruments, some without. There’s no one in charge. Some circles can lapse into a theme — say, songs about cats (a popular filk motif) — while others betray no obvious logic. The only rule is acceptance.
“In filk, we can all make music,” says 56-year-old Gary McGath of Nashua, New Hampshire, one of the masterminds behind The Filkado and a steward of the local filking community who was inducted into the Filk Hall of Fame in 2004. “It doesn’t matter so much if you’re good at it or not.”
“People are happy to hear you sing even if you’re out of tune,” says Estin, who performs under the moniker Dr. Snark. “People are happy to hear you play even if you just picked up the instrument.” Estin’s songs include “Fluorine Atom” (“She bonds energetically with the next cute guy she sees/Oh, how come that next guy is never me?”) and a tribute to the favorite sci-fi authors of his youth, “Isaac, Arthur, Robert, and Ray.”
