Festival of American Fiddle Tunes/Paul Conklin

 

Winter 2003/2004

ARTICLES

COLUMNS

  • Fiddle Tune History: Ned Kendall, by Andrew Kuntz
  • The Practicing Fiddler: Playing Fast 101, by Hollis Taylor
  • On Improvisation: "Rhythmizing" Your Swing Playing, by Paul Anastasio
  • Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour: British Columbia's Frankie Rodgers, by Gordon Stobbe
  • Bluegrass Fiddling: The Instrumental Genius of Scotty Stoneman, by Paul Shelasky
  • Fiddle Tune History: Speed the Plow, by Andrew Kuntz
  • Reviews of Recordings, Books, Video, DVD
  • In Memoriam: Howard "Louie Bluie" Armstrong, 1909-2003

TUNES

  • Blackwater Polka, by Matt Cranitch
  • Kathleen's Polka, by Matt Cranitch
  • Mícheál's Polka, by Matt Cranitch
  • A Mile Down the Road, by John McCusker; transcribed by Jack Tuttle
  • Ned Kendall's Hornpipe, White's Unique Collection (1896)
  • Ned Kendall's Favorite, White's Unique Collection (1896)
  • Ned Kendall's, Bruce and Emmett's Drummer's and Fifer's Guide (1862/1882), E. Kendall
  • Salem Hornpipe, White's Unique Collection (1896), Patrick S. Gilmore
  • Aunt Mary's Hornpipe (The Practicing Fiddler)
  • Ookpik Waltz, by Frankie Rodgers (Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour)
  • Larry's Ride, by Larry Richardson; solo by Scotty Stoneman, c. 1958; transcribed by Paul Shelasky
  • Snow Deer, solo by Scotty Stoneman, c. 1963; transcribed by Paul Shelasky

 

ARTICLE EXCERPTS

Matt Cranitch: Knee Deep in the Rushy Mountain

By Brendan Taaffe

Matt Cranitch is something of a renaissance man in the realm of Irish traditional music: player, scholar, exponent, teacher, writer. With a long history of tunes under his belt, having played with Na Filí, Any Old Time, and currently Sliabh Notes, Matt is also the author of The Irish Fiddle Book, one of the most useful and comprehensive instructional texts available to beginning students of the music. It was that book that got me on the right path with my bowing after some initial misadventures, and that I recommend to all of my serious students now. It's a rare combination -- someone who's able to both play the music with great skill and swing, and someone who's able to analyze as a scholar.

A Senior Research Scholar for the past year, with support from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Matt is at work on a dissertation looking at the music of his beloved Sliabh Luachra in greater detail. We met at his home in County Cork on a lovely afternoon this past winter.

Matt Cranitch: I grew up in the little village of Rathduff in County Cork, midway between Cork City and Mallow. Both my parents were teachers and taught in the local primary school, or national school, so they taught me at some stage. My father Mícheál played the accordion and the fiddle and sang a bit as well. My mother Kathleen sang. And my grandfather on my father's side, whose name was also Matt, was a melodeon player and a stepdancer. Now I never remember him playing, as he died when I was too young, but certainly I was aware that this was the case. When I was maybe seven my parents got me a fiddle and the plan was that my father would teach me. But the lessons tended to take the form that he'd play the fiddle and have me sit down and listen to him; so they decided to send me to the Cork School of Music instead. I went there when I was eight to learn what's called classical violin, and I continued with that and playing traditional music at home, both those activities in parallel. By my mid-teens I opted for the traditional playing and gave up the classical lessons. So that would have been my early development.

In your mid-teens, were there other young people opting for traditional music?

I should tell you my parents decided when they would get married and raise a family that they were going to speak Gaelic, so I grew up speaking Gaelic as my first language. We were the only house for miles that spoke Gaelic and English was my second language -- though when I went to school I suppose it became the dominant language. At that stage it's fair to say that there weren't many people around us that played music. I can think of one family in the parish who did play music -- a slightly different style of music I suppose, but outside of that we would have to travel into Cork city to encounter anybody else. We were kind of isolated in that we lived in a farm community in the countryside, so I didn't have other youth of my own age around me, playing.

Usually when you're a young fellow you want to be off playing hurling with the other lads. What was it that made you opt for the traditional tunes?

Well, I played hurling, too, with my friends. Even now I find it difficult to explain what the attraction is, but certainly at that stage we were drawn very much to the music. There's also the fact, even though we tend to forget about it, that our parents made sure that we practiced and there was discipline in our lives from that point of view. The music has rubbed off on all the family -- I have a sister in Italy who's a violinist, I have a sister here in Cork who plays piano primarily, but fiddle as well, and I have a brother who plays the tin whistle, the flute and church organ. All of us had music lessons when we were young, and we've all continued to play.

Where did you take it then, when you decided to focus on traditional music?

Like many other people, we went to the Fleadhanna Cheoil and competed in the various competitions. We had a family band; my father and the four of us playing. We used to compete and play at local school concerts and events like that. When I did my leaving certificate I went to University College Cork to study electrical engineering, but while that was going on I was playing, both in UCC and in various groups. It was while I was in college that I met Tomás Ó Canainn, who was teaching in the department of electrical engineering, and it was there that Na Filí were formed in 1969, with initially Raymond O'Shea on tin whistle. He left after a year or so, and then Tom Barry took his place. While all that was going on, I finished my engineering studies, but I decided to go back to college and study music, so I took a music degree. At that stage I was starting to develop an interest in indigenous styles of music. Up to then, I suppose, we were all playing the music that we heard at the Fleadhanna Cheoil and listening to the radio; Sean Maguire and Paddy Canny and the Tulla Ceili Band and whatever else was on the radio -- Ciarán Mac Mathúna's Job of Journeywork in particular. When I had finished my BMus, I felt like maybe I'd try my hand at doing a Master's degree relating to indigenous playing. The nearest such style of music to here is the Sliabh Luachra style, so I choose Mick Duggan, a Sliabh Luachra musician, as my subject. I went and spoke to him and did lots of field work and all the rest of it; recordings and interviews and so on, but of course, never wrote it up. I'm not alone in that, but I think I got the benefit from it in everything except the official piece of paper, in that I learned a huge amount, and it stimulated my whole interest in the question of fiddle playing styles and fiddle playing technique.

I continued playing with Na Filí until 1979, when we disbanded. I did a solo album of slow airs, Aisling Gheal, on the Gael Linn label, about 1984. I also started playing with two other lads here in Cork -- Mick Daly and Dave Hennessy, a great melodeon player -- in a group called Any Old Time, and over the years we did three albums: Any Old Time, Phoenix and Crossing. In 1983, John Loesberg of Ossian Publications approached me to write the Fiddle Book, which eventually was launched on the 9th of March, 1988. If I were to do it again I would have done it in a much shorter space of time, but as you know yourself So that came out in 1988, and soon afterwards the accompanying CDs, and in a sense that pushed the MA out of the way, with little hope of resurrection.

So going back -- that time you spent with Mick Duggan is what got you interested in Sliabh Luachra history and repertoire.

And particularly on one visit to Mick Duggan, on the 5th of February, 1978, he gave me all this pile of music, and inside were original Pádraig O'Keeffe manuscripts, in O'Keeffe's own writing. When I look back at it, that's the thing which fired me onto all of that; I became very interested in the whole Sliabh Luachra thing and spent nights and nights down in Knocknagree in particular. I suppose 'twas also the time that the Sliabh Luachra music was getting a bit more popular. The Kerry Fiddles record came out in 1977, and The Star Above The Garter had come out a bit before that. Jackie Daly and Seamus Creagh were playing wonderful music in that kind of style, and in Cork the set dancing revival had started, led initially in Cork by Timmy McCarthy, or Timmy the Brit as he is generally known, and also by Joe O'Donovan. Timmy was very adamant that the local sets, the polka sets, would be featured, and then, of course, the musicians had to play for those sets, so there was a cross fertilization. Lots of musicians, not only myself, became increasingly interested in the repertoire of the region and the repertoire of people like Denis [Murphy] and Julia [Clifford] and Johnny O'Leary. So from then on my interest in it became more and more and more, and I decided that I should embark on a kind of academic approach to it once again. But in parallel with all of this, I was working as a lecturer in the department of electronic engineering at Cork Institute of Technology. So my life was two-fold. On the one hand I was teaching electronics and related subjects, and on the other hand I was playing a lot of music. In 1994, Sliabh Notes was formed; in 1995 the first CD came out. In parallel with all of this, I decided to get back into academia. I spoke to Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin about embarking on something like this again and taking the bigger picture. I felt like O'Keeffe warranted an inclusion in the bigger picture, so after a while I decided that I'd sign on to work towards a PhD. This year I got an award of Senior Research Scholarship from the Irish Research Council for the Humanities and Social Sciences. So that's enabled me now to work full-time at this project, and I've also just submitted some things for publication.

Tell me more about Sliabh Notes.

Well, Sliabh Notes is the present group I'm involved with -- we have Dónal (Murphy) on accordion, Tommy (O'Sullivan) on guitar and songs, and myself on fiddle. Dónal lives in Abbeyfeale, and his father is an accordion player with great allegiance to the music of Scartaglen and places like that. Dónal'd grown up hearing lots of slides and polkas, so he and I had a huge rapport with regards to that kind of music, and find that we're asked frequently to play at céilís and sometimes at house dances. But our repertoire is not exclusively Sliabh Luachra; well over fifty percent is Sliabh Luachra material, some of it from the O'Keeffe manuscripts. On each of the CDs, we've also included music by Cuz Teahan. There's such wonderful music there that we feel we're delighted, and indeed honored, to put this stuff on CD, and make it more available to the public. We are also conscious of giving credit where possible to the sources and people like Mick Duggan, Johnny O'Leary and Paddy Cronin, because for a long time they were never known about. In a ay they're the forgotten heroes of this music -- the people who have passed this music on so generously.

Thinking about the book, one of the things that makes it such a good tool for people learning how to play, particularly people learning how to play who don't live in Ireland, is that you explain what to do with the bow.

The more I learn about fiddle playing, the more I realize that the secret, the whole art of it is in the bowing. While it's the left hand that makes the notes, it's the bow hand that makes the music, and I don't mean something just as straightforward as the bowing directions. Bowing is so much more than that. The bow makes the sound -- the bow is the only contact that the player has with making the sound. You can argue that the left hand makes the notes and that there are rolls -- and so there are -- but how you articulate the rolls, how you articulate the trebles, where you put the stress, where you put the accent, how you attack the note, whether you play it softly and all the rest -- it's the bowing that does that. A lot of people nowadays learning traditional music grow up in a household where traditional music is not known, for instance people in cities where pop music is on the radio all day ­­ the children listen to pop music but the parents would like them to be traditional musicians. They go to fiddle class a half hour a week and for the rest of the week they don't hear a note of the music, so they have no reference. The only thing they have is the bow directions, but for the most part they would often interpret the bow directions like a classical player would interpret them. Now contrast that with, let's say, the time when Pádraig O'Keeffe was teaching: there weren't radios, the only music that a lot of people heard was fiddle players playing in houses, so there was a lot of unwritten and unspoken musical education imparted in the sense that you knew how the music should sound, you knew what the swing was, you had all that unwritten information and nobody needed to tell you about it. When I was doing the book, I felt that I wanted to be able to give sufficient directions that people got some sense of the swing of the music. If I were writing the fiddle book now, in the light of the additional knowledge I have, I would probably be even more overt in that sense. When I give workshops I tend to start from that viewpoint; at a lot of workshops people get taught tune after tune after tune but, in my opinion, very few tutors talk about the "how." Over the years, people have asked me, "How do you do it, how do you play that?" All of which has led me today to be very interested in trying to answer the question of what it is that the fiddle players are doing to make the music sound the way it does. When I talk about Pádraig O'Keeffe or Paddy Canny or Johnny Doherty or Jay Ungar or whoever, I'm interested in what they're doing, and in the power of the bow. The power of the bowhand is absolutely immense and greatly underrated.

How do you approach teaching?

In master classes, I tend to look more at passing on to people the ideas and the techniques that will help them to advance themselves. It would be very easy for me to go into a class and teach two tunes today and two tunes the next day, but I think that will never improve a person's overall playing. My approach is that I'm teaching this tune today, but we're doing this because we're going to concentrate on rolls or on a certain aspect of articulating phrases. We'll concentrate on that tune and get into the swing of it, but then at the end of the class I'll say, "Now if you take those ideas and try to incorporate them into your existing repertoire you can improve all of what you have, all of your music." I find that people are trying to learn, or are being taught, tunes slowly, complete with all the ornamentation included. I would tend to think that at a beginning level, a bit more emphasis needs to be put on looking at the less obvious part of the music, the swing and the articulation and all that. It's a bit like talking -- none of us talks in a monotone, people don't sing in a monotone. You phrase your talking and you can accentuate the meaning of what you want to say, rather than saying a lot of complicated words in a hurry. It mightn't be a great analogy, but my thinking would be along those lines.

...

[Brendan Taaffe is a farmer and teacher in central Vermont. He plays fiddle, guitar, and penny whistle. He has a CD called Come Sit By My Chair. Email: laughingrock@hotmail.com]

 

Photo: Courtesy Compass Records

John McCusker: Modern Traditionalist

By Michael Simmons

When John McCusker was seven years old, a music teacher stopped by his school and asked if any of the pupils were interested in learning the violin. "When she heard about it, my mother immediately said that I was," he recalls. "I wasn't so sure, but she was. And so I began learning the violin, playing in orchestras and studying classical music." McCusker's mother had dreams of him going on to have a distinguished career as a concert violinist, and so he has. But instead of playing classical music, he confounded her expectations by growing to become one of Scotland's finest traditional fiddlers.

John McCusker is only twenty-nine years old but he has already put together a career that musicians twice his age would be proud of. He made his first record at the age of fourteen and joined the famous Battlefield Band at the age of sixteen and traveled the world and recorded with them for eleven years. He's released three highly acclaimed solo albums, played as a guest artist on 150 more, and produced tracks for some of the finest folk artists on the current scene including Eliza Carthy, Cathie Ryan, and Kate Rusby, who was so impressed with his work that she married him. In 1999 he won the Glenfiddich Spirit of Scotland Award for his contribution to Scottish music, and in 2003 he was named the Musician of the Year at the BBC 2 Folk Awards ceremony.

McCusker's mother may have wanted her son to play classical music, but she inadvertently set him on his path into the world of traditional music. "My mother is from Ireland and there were always traditional Celtic records playing around the house," he says. "She would play things by the Chieftains and De Dannan, which is where I first started hearing that kind of music. That turned out to be a good thing for me because I grew up in a small village outside of Glasgow and there were no traditional musicians there at all."

McCusker proved to be a talented violinist and he was accepted to Glasgow's Royal Academy, where he was trained in classical violin techniques. But even as was working his way through the Kreutzer studies at school, he was absorbing the intricacies of Celtic fiddling from records at home. "After a while I found the classical and traditional music started getting in the way of each other," he says. "My classical teachers would give me grief because I was starting to stamp my foot when I was playing Beethoven."

In 1986, when he was thirteen, McCusker and his school mates flautist Kevin McCarthy, guitarist Francis Macdonald, and singer Patrick Murphy formed their own folk band called the Parcel O' Rogues. At the suggestion of a teacher named Gordon MacPherson, they entered a national school music competition, which led to an invitation to play in London at the National Festival of Music for Youth. The Rogues spent the next couple of years playing concerts, when they could find time in their school schedules.

Three years after coming together, Parcel O' Rogues recorded an album for Temple Records, the home of some of Scotland's finest traditional musicians. The record included songs written by folk artists like Si Kahn, John Prine, and Peter Nardini as well as instrumentals composed by McCusker and Macdonald. The original tunes were of very high quality and were named for some of the people who inspired the band, including jazz great Stéphane Grappelli and Gordon MacPherson, who was honored with "The Blackbeard," a title that paid tribute to his ample facial hair.

Robin Morton, the director of Temple Records and the manager for the Battlefield Band, was extremely impressed with McCusker's musical gifts. "When I was sixteen, Robin asked me what I wanted to do with my life," McCusker recalls. "I told him I wanted to play with a group like the Battlefield Band and he said that the fiddler was leaving the band and did I want the job. I was stunned. I mean I was this little kid and all of a sudden I was touring the world with one of my favorite groups. It was fantastic. I traveled and recorded with them for eleven years. It was a great learning experience. When I joined the group Alan Reid, the keyboard player, had been with them for like twenty years and he taught so much about playing and how to survive on the road."

As much as he loved playing onstage with the Battlefield Band, McCusker feels that the best part about touring was getting to meet and play with some of his musical heroes. "I got to hang out at festivals and other gigs with players like Kevin Burke, Aly Bain, Martin Hayes, and Liz Carroll and play tunes with them," he says. "I learned so much in those backstage sessions. I grew up listening to these people and here I was playing with them. I couldn't believe how wonderful Martin Hayes sounded when I first heard him in person. I think his music is pure beauty."

McCusker began writing tunes at a furious pace, many of which were recorded by the band. Writing music had always come easily to him, and he recalls composing melodies even before he got his first violin. "I started writing my own tunes when I was seven or eight," he says. "I had a tin whistle and I was always making things up on it. I started writing more seriously when I was with Parcel O' Rouges when we were getting ready to make that record. I'm lucky that I've always loved writing tunes and it's great to record them with friends. I do love old, traditional tunes but sometimes I think my tunes are what I have to offer to continue the tradition."

After five years in the Battlefield Band, McCusker had quite a back catalog of tunes built up, so in 1995 he went into the studio to record his first solo album. "That session was where I first recorded 'Frank's Reel,'" he says. "It has since been recorded by Solas and Natalie MacMaster and has become my little well-known tune."

...

In 2000 McCusker released Yella Hoose, his second solo CD. That was followed in 2003 by Goodnight Ginger. Both CDs featured a generous helping of McCusker's compositions, played by some of the finest musicians working in the traditional vein. "I started working with people like the guitarist Ian Carr, concertina player Simon Thoumire, bassist Andy Seward, and flautist Michael McGoldrick when I started doing Kate's CDs," he says. "We've all become great friends. When it comes time to make a record we all gather at my place, work up a few arrangements and then go next door to the home studio that Kate and I have."

McCusker's compositions have a strong traditional melodic feel, although the rhythms and harmonies can sound quite modern. They also have a spare, stripped-down sound when compared to his work with the Battlefield Band. "I loved the wall of sound we got with Battlefield, with the pipe and keyboards and everything," he says. "But I also love the simple sound of a fiddle playing a waltz and backed by just a guitar."

...

[Michael Simmons, Fiddler Magazine's Review Editor, is a guitar player and writer living in Mountain View, California. He is also co-publisher of The Ukelele Occasional.]

 

Photo: Carol Yarrow

From Concertos to Fiddle Tunes to Jazz to Fences: Playing it All

By Peter Anick

I'm sure our readers will all recognize the name "Hollis Taylor." As author of "The Practicing Fiddler" column for the last few years, Hollis has shared her insights with us on just about any topic that's likely to cross the fiddler's path -- from warm-up exercises to pizzicato to how to listen. As you might guess from the range and depth of her columns, her musical path was hardly straight and narrow. But if you haven't heard her "Unsquare Dances" or "Twisted Fiddle" or "Frames & Boxes," you might not guess just how many genres and continents her trail has crossed since she started her musical career as a teenager with the Oregon Symphony. I managed to catch her for this interview as she was finishing up a short visit back to Portland and was about to fly back to the place she now calls home -- Australia.

Listening to your latest recordings it sounds like you are getting back to your roots, which I presume are in classical music?

I was classically trained. I learned first of all from my grandmother who was at that time blind. What I realized very early on was that I liked Bach and Bartók and not a whole lot in between. What I've come to see now is that, for me, music is really dance and not song. You take some of the great young classical players of our day, like Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. She came from an opera background. Her grandfather was playing opera to her and you see it in the left hand. It's all about vibrato and song. And to me it's not about song, it's about dance. So for me, I'm a right hand person. I like everything the bow can do to impart rhythm and dance and groove.

Did that come from your grandmother or did you figure that out later?

No, that was me looking and seeing -- I like Bach and Bartók, and they're the dance movements, the things that are grooving and dancing. And the third part of that trinity is Monk, once I got into jazz. Those are my three favorite composers.

What got you thinking about the fiddle as opposed to the violin? A lot of people in the classical line tend to look down on the fiddle.

Absolutely. Of course, moreso twenty years ago when I was getting involved in it. Now I think it's got more respect, with people like Mark O'Connor. But I certainly had reasonable success with classical music. I taught at Reed College here in Portland and I gave an annual recital and I had played in the Oregon Symphony, although I knew that wasn't what I wanted to do for the rest of my life. But I went on a thirteen month fly-fishing trip and for part of that time I was in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. And Shelley Clark had a great radio program. She's a great fiddler and I think had been Wyoming champion, but I'm not sure of that. Anyway, she had a radio program for an hour every night and she would play this incredible music. Byron Berline, Johnny Gimble I was going crazy! I started taping things off the radio. I was so excited to finally hear some good fiddling. Because I'd bought a book or two, and that was back in the days when the books were really just maps or outlines, you know. It was just so simple and so boring. You didn't have a sense of how to make your own version from there. So I started transcribing solos. And when I came back from that trip, I entered the Oregon Old-Time Fiddle Contest and became state fiddle champion, much to my shock.

Was that the first contest you'd ever entered?

Yes! I was shocked! And I think the people that lost to me were not so happy, either. I don't know if I had an old time sound. I think I'd gotten some of it by ear, not just from a book.

How did you, a classical player, adjust to playing by ear?

I did write these things out. Because I have perfect pitch it was pretty easy to transcribe what I was hearing. I would just pick the best players -- write it out and learn it. I wouldn't say I was playing by ear at that point. Of course, later on, I got asked to start playing places because I was the state champion. So I put together a trio with Steve Reichman on guitar and vocals and Kevin Johnson, who's a great mandolin player and knew a lot about big band riffs and western swing and bluegrass. They knew everything and there I was, I had no idea. In fact, they had formerly played with David Balakrishnan because he had lived in Portland for a while. So they gave me a tape and I would write out the solo that David had improvised and memorize that. I had no idea how to improvise. I would write out the vocal backup. In fact, David told me years later that some student of his came to him and said, "Listen to this hot solo. Can you teach it to me?" David was listening and he said, "God, that fellow sounds familiar." And then he realized what had happened. I had learned his solo and played it and some student of his had gotten a tape of it somehow. So it took me a while to figure out that even though I didn't ever want to be an improviser, all the music that I really loved the most required that I improvise....

...Composing and arranging are, in a sense, like improvising, just on a different time scale. Do you feel that way about it?

Absolutely. I think they are exactly the same. I like actually having more time. Because the hardest thing about improvising is that I am a perfectionist. And as a woman of my generation, I don't have a personality that wants to take up a lot of space. So, if I have written something and it's this long, then I ought to play it. I have a right to finish it. But if I was improvising, I'll just take one chorus and let somebody else take more.

...

What do you see yourself doing differently in terms of the right hand, now that you've been through the fiddle and jazz?

I just gave a workshop yesterday and had some people that were classical and it's so easy to see. First of all, the left hand, they do vibrate to beat the band, don't they?! It's just amazing. You think they'd lighten up a little bit on it. Right hand Well, certainly if I'm doing anything that has some jazz inflection, I'm going to be practicing with a metronome on (beats) two and four and that's going to get into the bow somehow. And I think there are a whole lot of what they love to call "extended techniques," meaning other ways to use the bow that aren't in the standard books and in the standard lessons you get from conservatories. There's a new book, quite nice, The Contemporary Violin, by Allen and Patricia Strange, on extended performance techniques. It's big and has all sorts of examples.

So it's gradually working its way into the mainstream in classical music, then?

Gradually, but I think they're very slow. I think the younger people are hungry for it and they know that they're going to need it. There aren't that many jobs out there any more and you've got to be cross-trained, shall we say. You've got to be able to do more than one thing. All of the chops and accents. I really like an increase and decrease in bow speed, for example, to give a real feeling of movement. People say, "I can't stop vibrating." It's because every long note does need to grow or diminish. Any note that is long that you just hold is going to be boring. So you can do it with bow speed. And if it's truly long, you can add some vibrato and then have the vibrato change, but I'm a really big one on changing bow speed.

In Baroque music, there really wasn't much vibrato, was there?

No, so there's a lot of commonalities between Baroque and jazz.

A lot more using the bow to advantage, even changing the tension on the hair.

Sure, and they had some swing in there. There were a lot of common things.

Bach's chord changes sound a lot like swing tunes sometimes, don't they?

Yeah, and not all that different from a hoedown, either. You can go straight from Bach into "Sally Johnson" Texas-style and they're not all that different.

Now, you've been into world music as well. Weren't you at one point studying African drumming?

When I lived in Paris, I studied African drumming and that was such a help to me. I was studying rhythms. My teacher would play a rhythm on his drum and I would play it with him, and once he felt I really had it, he would start to change it. And I was to hold mine, and he would put another totally disparate rhythm against it. Boy, did that help the rhythm get into my body and out of my head, which is where it has to be.

That's something I don't think you run into many violinists doing.

And I think for jazz, it would be a great starting point. When I read that people want to learn all the chord theory and play everything in twelve keys, I think, yeah, but go play the drums for a year first. It don't mean a thing if it ain't got that swing!

And then you also spent some time in Budapest.

Right. After two years in Paris, then I went for a year to Budapest. I traveled a lot around Europe and even went down to Morocco and collected a lot of things. By collecting, I mean I bought things at record stores, at music stores, in markets. I went to folk dances and bought things. I wasn't taking a horse out to someone's house. The idea that you could even do that in this day and age, I think, is pretty remote, because you don't walk into somebody's home or somebody's jam session and say, "Here's my tape recorder. Play me your hottest, best tune." They're not going to just give you their best tune. Anyway, I did collect a lot of things that were in compound meter and based on that, changed them a lot and composed the violin duos, "Unsquare Dances."

From Budapest, how did you find your way to Australia?

I came back to Portland for a few years, then went to New York for about a year and a half, and loved every minute of every day in New York. I went to every concert that possibly looked interesting. Most of it wasn't, but I did go a lot, and that's where I wrote the violin concerto. Then I went back and forth between Paris and Sydney for a year, and now I'm in Sydney. In Sydney, I have a couple of different projects that I'm really excited about. I'm finally bringing to fruition this jazz CD that I've wanted to do for a long time, and doing a lot of solo things à la Bach and making the violin be the whole instrument -- the bass, the accompaniment, the melody. Everything in one instrument. So I'm doing a lot of solo violin things on jazz standards, like "Opus to Funk" and "Embraceable You," which was partially inspired by what Sven Asmussen did on it, and I just tried to take it a whole lot further than that. So I'm enjoying doing that and I want to get that done this year. And I'm doing a fiddle album this year, too, for which my arrangements are about a third of the way done. This is hoedowns. I've never really performed that many hoedowns, so I'm going for hoedowns like "Say Old Man, Can You Play the Fiddle?" and "Sally Johnson," a lot of things that I've got that are quite twisted and jazz-influenced. And my partner Jon Rose is going to accompany me on fence.

On fence! Yes, talk a little about that fence.

Oh, it's just the craziest idea. I first heard him play a fence in Berlin at an avant-garde string festival that I was performing at. And I immediately thought this is the most weird avant-garde thing that you could imagine. Bowing a fence, bowing a five-wire fence, a bit of barbed wire on top. He even ran a violin down the fence and played it with that. He had a wire about an inch from the ground. Talk about a walking bass -- he'd walk along that, and I thought this is really out! And then the next time I saw him do it was on Easter Sunday in outback Australia on a sheep station for the locals. And they were equally fascinated. They didn't think it was particularly avant-garde or weird. They thought it was fascinating to hear the sound of this structure that they took for granted.

So he'd use a fence that was already there?

Yes! He'd just put some contact microphones into the wood and a little amp...

And he bowed it?

Yeah.

Hmmm. And did you play along with that or was he doing a solo fence?

No, that was him. Then, the third time I actually did play with him. My first fence was one we erected in a school gymnasium in Paris for a techno crowd. They thought it was très cool. And so, it seems like the fence really does have an audience. And now we have a fence CD out. My first CD released on a real label. Peter, I had to wait all these years, all these lessons, all the hours of practice, and now I'm playing fence!

...

www.hollistaylor.com

[Peter Anick, co-author of Mel Bay's Old Time Fiddling Across America, plays fiddle and mandolin with the Massachusetts-based "jamgrass" band Acoustic Planet (www.acousticplanet.org).]

 

Photo: Candace Horgan

String Cheese Incident's Michael Kang

By Candace Horgan

From their humble beginnings playing ski areas for lift tickets, Colorado's String Cheese Incident has risen to the upper echelons of the jam band circuit. Led by Michael Kang's spiraling solos on both mandolin and fiddle, String Cheese Incident has blended bluegrass with rock to carve out a unique place in the jam band scene. The group's shows often sell out, and fans travel around the country to hear them play live. The group releases all their concerts on CD, and encourages fans to tape the shows as well. The band has just released their fourth studio effort, Untying the Knot, which sees them going in another direction, using more electronica and dance styles under their bluegrass and bass. The band likes to explore all musical directions, including Irish music, funk, folk, and rock. They have played covers as diverse as Led Zeppelin's "Ramble On" and Tim O'Brien's "Land's End," the latter of which is a concert favorite. I caught up with Kang just after the band had headlined two shows at Colorado's famous Red Rocks Amphitheater.

When did you start playing the violin, and what drew you to it?

When I was seven. My parents wanted to get me into playing music, and the teacher we had at the time was a memorable teacher. It was all classical music that I learned. He was an old guy, Mr. Lightowler, and he was about seventy. I was living in England at the time. His wife taught piano and ballet, and he had an attic and you'd sit there and learn. He had an amazing miniature train set that covered half the room. When you got through the lessons you got to play with the trains. Violin is tedious to learn, and that made it fun. It was a good strategy, actually....

Did you play in any orchestras growing up?

All through high school, then I dropped the violin in college and learned how to play the guitar. I picked up fiddle and mandolin at the same time. I got the mandolin because I had no fiddle chops after not playing for two years, and learning the fiddle tunes on mandolin helped me get them back.... The concerto that I wanted to play most was Mozart's G Major Violin Concerto. I worked on it for about a year, and it was the height of my ability to play violin. I never took it super seriously. At the time I was going to [Grateful] Dead shows and wanted to be an electric guitar player more than anything. I stuck with it on violin though and learned a lot. I learned some Paganini stuff and we did one of the Tchaikovsky pieces. I wasn't playing first violin so I didn't do any solos. I remember being amazed by the guy who pulled it off; he was conservatory bound and practiced six to eight hours a day and I wasn't about to do that.

When did you move to Colorado, and what led you to Crested Butte and Telluride?

I moved here in '92, in the winter, and to Crested Butte to ski. I got here in a big El Niño year and they had a huge dump. It snowed a lot and I skied powder for the year. I had known Keith (Moseley, String Cheese bass player) from working with him in Greenpeace, and I met Billy (Nershi, String Cheese guitarist) when I got to Crested Butte. This marketing director at the area gave us free passes if we would play together in the lift lines, so I learned a lot of bluegrass from Billy. I started listening to it; at the time my musical influences were going that way, from going to Telluride Bluegrass and seeing Mark O'Connor and Béla Fleck. They opened my mind up and blew me away with the possibilities you could get. Violin for me was never an improvised music till I heard people like Tim O'Brien and Sam Bush. My interests were more in jazz at that time, and I listened to a lot of Pat Metheny. That is when I started electric mandolin, to pick up more of that electric guitar sound that Metheny had.

Did you play in any bands before String Cheese Incident?

A couple of bands. I played violin in a band called Edgar in San Francisco, but not seriously. I never played in any bands that had gigs; so I don't know, are you a band if you don't get gigs? String Cheese Incident was really my first real band.

Why did you start playing the mandolin?

I think part of it is that violin is so technically difficult. I remember having this conversation with Darol Anger and Mike Marshall. Mike was convinced all violin players are completely crazy. Not having full chord structure for one makes it harder to play. My chordal instrument of choice is guitar. Violin is mostly a lead instrument. The tone is beautiful, but you have to be so on top of your game, and it would have to be an obsession for you to get it real good, and I'm not that way. For the band, I wanted to concentrate more on the mandolin, more electric styles. Originally I played an electric violin, but I like the acoustic one better now. The sound of a violin, even playing one note, can really move people in a deep way. I want to try to get in different sounds like Afro Celt Sound System does and explore roots in Celtic music and bring that into electric music.

How does your approach to each instrument differ, especially with improvisation?

Violin has its own voice. You have to think of it more as a human voice and you can develop a lyrical style. Since the fingerings are the same as on mandolin, I play similar things, but the violin is a more fluid instrument. I can do a lot more on the mandolin because you don't have to worry about the intonation; you have frets to guide you. With violin, you have to be on it and do things you know you can pull off. There are people out there who can move between positions a lot, but that's where the practice comes in. I don't know anyone who can pick up the violin and just wail on it....

You were in a band, Comotion, with Darol Anger last year; do you plan to do another project with him?

It's been great, but we've been so busy. I just got in touch with him again. We try to work it out to see each other, but I haven't had a chance to hang out with him. I saw Mike (Marshall) this summer. I want to get back with them, but I've had such a busy year with the new CD that I haven't had a chance to get with them. I've also been surfing a lot, too. That's been my outside passion and will help my music. I think that oftentimes getting away from what you do can give you a fresh perspective. I am personally not a singularly obsessed musician who needs to play all the time to be content with what I have going on musically. The things that inspire me are getting new themes to write songs about. I find that when I get away and not play I get to tap into a new source and get inspired. Going to Burning Man, I feel like I came back inspired, even though I only played once. It comes through with an emotional quality. How technically adept you are isn't as important as what emotional weight you play with. Some people don't have technical chops but play with such feeling; that is the essence of performance. Some people can blow you away technically, but those who move me the most use the least technique to get a point across.

...

[Candace Horgan is a freelance writer living in Denver, Colorado, who covers music for the Denver Post, Relix, and other publications.]

 

Mittenwald, Germany: A 300-year-old Tradition of Violin-Making

By Ellen Hansen

Mittenwald, Germany, has many claims to fame: as an important trading center on the great north/south trade route of the Middle Ages; for its gaily-colored building frescos dating from the 17th and 18th centuries; as a magnificent alpine retreat. In 1786, Goethe called Mittenwald "a living picturebook," nestled as it is in the Bavarian Alps. Yet musicians know Mittenwald as a mecca of a different sort. Like Cremona, Italy, Mittenwald is synonymous with quality stringed instruments; Mittenwald is where many of the world's finest fiddles are born.

Luthiers have been making violins in Mittenwald for more than three hundred years, all thanks to a certain Matthias Klotz (1653-1743). Following his apprenticeship in Parma, Italy, and years of work as a journeyman, Klotz returned to Mittenwald in 1683 and set up shop as a master violin maker. Conditions in his hometown favored this new trade: there was plenty of good wood, well-established trade routes for marketing, and no competition. Soon, Klotz began teaching the trade to his sons and the sons of other citizens.

By 1750, seven years after Klotz's death, there were fifteen violin makers in Mittenwald. By 1803, the listed occupations of Mittenwald's 1700 inhabitants included: fifteen shopkeepers, two coal refiners, two flour millers, six butchers, twelve bakers, four old and five new pub owners, ninety violin makers, twelve (violin) bow makers, three hunters, fifteen peddlers with oxen, twenty-three peddlers with horses These peddlers sold Mittenwald violins to the nearby Ettal Monastery, and gradually branched out to monasteries in Munich and Nuremberg. Water trade routes brought Mittenwald violins as far as Passau, Vienna, and Budapest.

As the demand for Mittenwald violins grew, many farmers and other citizens specialized in building certain violin parts at home: some planed top and bottom plates, others carved violin necks or turned violin pegs. In 1810, two instrument firms were founded -- J.A. Baader & Co. and Neuner & Hornsteiner -- intensifying the building and sale of violins. This resulted in more plentiful and less expensive violins entering the market, but also raised questions about the quality of violins now coming out of Mittenwald.

At the suggestion of Bavarian King Max II, Mittenwald's Geigenbauschule (Violin-building School) was founded in 1858, to safeguard Mittenwald's violin-making reputation. To this day, students come from around the world (from China, France, Germany, Japan, Sweden, Switzerland, the USA) to learn the art of violin-making in Mittenwald. There are at present forty students learning violin-making at the Geigenbauschule, and twelve students learning to build other plucked instruments, including guitars and lutes.

Picturesque Mittenwald, at the foot of Karwendel and Wetterstein mountains, is only three square kilometers in area. Yet approximately twenty-five luthiers are currently making violins in Mittenwald, including six Geigenbaumeister (violin-making masters) who each have their own workshop. I recently had the opportunity to interview two of these Geigenbaumeister -- Anton Maller and Anton Sprenger.

 

Anton Maller

How did you get started building violins?

In 1966, I entered the three and a half year program at Mittenwald's Geigenbauschule. After taking my journeyman's exam, I worked with two well-known violin-making masters: one year with Max Möller in Amsterdam, and two years with Walter Hamma in Stuttgart. Following this three-year apprenticeship, I took the Meister Prüfung (Master's Exam), which included building a violin from start to finish. At that time, I was the youngest master violin builder in Germany. I am, with all my heart and soul, a Mittenwalder. I've been making violins here in my workshop since 1974. Also, for six years, from 1991 through 1996, I taught violin-building, theory and practice at the Geigenbauschule, to pass my knowledge along to the next generation.

Which came first for you -- playing the violin or building violins?

Building violins. First I built violins, and then started playing. I was born in Mittenwald, my family has lived here since 1583. In the 1920s, there were hard times. There was no money, so my father didn't make violins. But my grandfather was a wood-turner, so there's a history there of working with wood. I was involved with wood from an early age, and all kinds of carving, and was drawn to drawing, too. So it made sense to go to the Geigen-bauschule here in Mittenwald. Nowadays, it's a requirement to enter the Geigenbauschule that you've played a stringed instrument for two years, because so many more people want to enter now. But I didn't start playing until I was in school.

What do you consider the most important elements to violin-making?

Good workmanship, the wood you use, the varnish -- all these are important. But I'd say the most important is the spirit of the violin maker, "die Seele" (the soul, heart) that goes into it. My instruments, in look and tone, are very similar to old instruments....

How do you decide what form or style of violin to build?

I make what people want. Nowadays, most people want the Italian forms -- the Stradivarius or Guarneri style violin. But my favorite? It's the Klotz style, the Mittenwald style. It's an elegant, fine form. I will sometimes make one of these and hang it in my shop's window. "Mein Lieblingsinstrument" (my "darling," favorite instrument), and maybe someone buys it...

Within the Stradivarius style, there's the 1700s style, and a later style that sounds quite different. In Mittenwald, we build violins based on the Baroque style -- the older Italian style of the middle 1700s. Some makers in Italy today are after a newer, modern sound. In Mittenwald, we're looking back to the roots, to the older Italian style....

What advice would you give someone who is looking to buy a violin?

All four strings should have a full, even tone. That's the difference between a factory and a handmade instrument: full tone. Other than that, it's really about personal taste. You need to try out an instrument yourself.

What is unique about your instruments?

The look, the tone, "die Verarbeitung" (workmanship). An instrument of mine looks like it could be 300 years old. One knows, can easily recognize, one's own instruments. To get the tone I'm looking to build into a violin, I rely on my experience. Skill comes from years of working with wood: you bend it, know by feel, take measurements with instruments while you work; you listen [he holds up a back plate he's been planing, puts his ear to it, and taps it with a fingertip to check the tone].

For me, building violins is my hobby as well as my career. If your art is painting a picture, you can see it and feel it. The fascinating thing about violin-making is that you get to see it, feel it, and hear it.

 

Anton Sprenger

...

How did you get your start?

I started playing the violin at about age ten. At age sixteen, I entered the three and a half year program at the Geigenbauschule. After finishing, I worked two years in The Hague, with Benedict Lang, the builder of cellos and basses. I took my master's exam in 1995, the same year I opened my workshop with my cousin Leo, who makes guitars and zithers.

Where do you get your wood?

I get wood from wood dealers. Spruce comes from the Alps -- that's high quality spruce. Also, I get spruce from my father-in-law's forest. Maple comes from Bosnia, Yugoslavia -- the Italians also used Bosnia maple for their violins; and ebony from Africa and India....

What are the important elements to create the sound you're looking for in building an instrument?

The thickness of the wood, arching of the plates, the form, the size of the violin itself, the f-holes. If it's hard wood, it must be thinly planed; if it's soft wood, thicker planed. I look for tricks from the old violin makers -- especially in the small parts, the small but important parts. It's the attention to details. Every day you can learn more. And the sound post, bridge, strings have an effect, too.

It's also important for Geigenbaumeister to play the instruments, to feel it under their fingers -- making sure it's not too thick in the neck, that it's easy to handle. My instruments are sleek and elegant in form, but dark, strong and capable of projecting. They range in price from 3600 Euro to 8200 Euro. I renew, and rebuild violins in my workshop, too, and do sound checks. Thirty percent of the tone can be changed through rebuilding, as long as the instrument hasn't already been through multiple shops.

What about varnish?

The varnish can't be too hard. A clear coat is best, and that means the right medium of varnish. I used amber with linseed oil on this violin I finished today. I get amber from the jewelers' left-overs. I've also used myrrh in a varnish. I like the old varnishes, the spirit of old instruments. That's the interesting aspect, the long life of instruments. The oldest violin, say 500 years old, sounds better now, perhaps, than when it was made.

Do you have some advice for someone looking to buy an instrument?

In choosing a violin, feel with your heart. I like a deep sound: powerful, but not too powerful, not hard. And carrying power, ease of resonance, modulation, so you can express your soul. There's lots between heaven and earth -- you can't see it, but you can feel it.

...

Anton Maller: www.violin-maller.de

Anton Sprenger: www.geigenbau-sprenger.de

[Ellen Hansen is a writer and fiddler living in Helvetia, Oregon. She plays for Scandinavian, Scottish, English, and contra dances in the Portland area, and can be reached at EllenLHansen@earthlink.net. A highlight of her recent trip to Germany was the joy of meeting, learning from, and playing the instruments of Geigenbaumeister Maller and Sprenger.]

For full versions of these articles, please visit Fiddler Magazine store to order back issues.