Fiddle Tunes at Centrum: The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes

Spend the week of June 28 - July 5, 2009 living, learning, and jamming with masters of North American fiddling traditions.

The Festival of American Fiddle Tunes provides an opportunity to be in community with the bearers of fiddle traditions.

The goals of the gathering are broader than improving your skills as a musician, and include discovering culture through music, learning music in a cultural context, and building lifelong relationships in the fiddle music community.

Now in its 33rd year, “Fiddle Tunes” is a week-long, total-immersion workshop with a hallmark of presenting an expansive array of regional fiddle styles. Workshops, classes, band labs, tutorials, dances, concerts, singing, open jams, hat parties – all contribute to a week of living, learning, and jamming with masters of North American fiddling traditions

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You’ll learn by the oral tradition - listen, imitate, listen, practice, and listen again. You won’t get any written music on paper, except by accident. The main teaching focus is on the fiddle, but you’ll find day-long instruction on the banjo, guitar, and button accordion, and nearly as many classes on piano, keyboard accordion, singing, clogging, string bass, mandolin, and social dance.

Tuition for the week is $495, and includes all workshop activities and concerts. Room and board options range from $175 to $495. Scholarships are available; let us know if we can help.

What happens during the week?

Let’s walk through the week. You’ll arrive at Fort Worden on Sunday, June 28, after 3:30pm, and pick up your registration packet, which has a schedule, your button, and your meal ticket if you ordered one. You’ll have time to settle into your dorm room (or other housing) in time for the first event, which is dinner in the Commons at 5:30. After dinner we’ll have an extensive welcoming session where we’ll attempt to introduce everyone who is teaching during the week. This is harder than it sounds, as there are more than 70 people on staff. Your goals at the welcome session might be to visually identify the faculty, try to choose who you want to spend time with during the week, and enjoy other styles of music that you won’t have time to study.

There are two categories of staff--the faculty and the tutors. During the week each faculty person will teach four morning classes, lead an afternoon “band lab,” play for an evening dance, and play an intimate in-house concert set in the Wheeler Theater.

Most tutors are selected to provide introductory level instruction in the musical styles presented by the faculty. The main responsibility of the tutors is to address the needs of beginning and advanced beginning musicians. Tutorial sessions are held each afternoon, are universally small (generally 2-5 people), and are open to all. You will also find tutors leading jam sessions with a spirit of graceful encouragement, playing for dances, and generally being a a welcoming and helpful presence throughout the week.

So, it’s 9:30 Monday morning. Let’s say you’re an intermediate level Scottish fiddler. You check your schedule, and you see that there are eight fiddle classes in various styles - Cajun, Quebecois, old-time, New England, Cape Breton, Irish, and Basque music. There are also classes in Round Peak style banjo, back-up guitar, Cajun accordion, and clogging. You have your choice, and you decide to go to the Irish fiddle class.

Same thing happens at 11, with a new slate of classes, before we break for lunch.

At 2pm, you have two choices – you can take a Cape Breton fiddle tutorial, which is geared towards beginners. Or, you can join a band. Each faculty person leads a band during the week, and you’ve already decided that you’re going to join the Cape Breton band lab. This means you’ll meet each afternoon with the same folks (mostly), and try to learn some tunes in that faculty person’s style. Your band will play for a dance towards the end of the week, and also for an in-house concert on Saturday morning.

After the band lab you still have some energy, so you check “The Board.” All kinds of spontaneous workshops are on The Board, posted by everyone – participants, faculty, and tutors. Today you see cards that read “duet singing,” ”world choir,” and “square dancing for Volvos,” among others. You decide to forget it, and start up a jam session on the grass in front of the Schoolhouse.

After dinner, there is a four-set faculty concert in the theater. There’s no sound system, the music is splendid and varied, and you stay until the end. At about 9:30, two dances commence – a Cajun band is playing in one dance hall, and some contra dances are being called in another. You check The Board again, and you see that there are bands and callers scheduled until 3am. You end up dancing a little, and then find yourself in a jam session which is still going as the sky lightens in the east.

This goes on all week. By Tuesday you feel like you’ve been here for eight days. By Thursday you wonder how the time has passed so quickly.

The weekend starts with a dance open to the public. There’s some good food and a beer garden, and a generally festive atmosphere. On Saturday morning, all of the band labs play an in-house concert, honoring their mentors for thw week. In the afternoon the faculty is presented to the public in a pair of performances in McCurdy Pavilion, which is an old military hangar at Fort Worden that Centrum coverted into a performing arts venue. There’s nothing like it! Then, of course, jamming and dancing all night.

Is the gathering appropriate for children?

Absolutely! The Festival is an intergenerational gathering, and we welcome musicians of all ages and abilities to participate fully in Festival activities.

If your child is 12 or younger, we offer a special morning session from 9:30am-12:30pm that features fiddling, fun and games focused on younger children. In the afternoon, these young fiddlers can choose to participate in a special 'kids band lab.'

That’s how your experience might go – if you have any questions about any of this, send Peter McCracken an email: peter@centrum.org