unexpected awesome times
Music workshops are difficult beasts. What can people learn in an afternoon? What is the workshop leader supposed to do - lecture about tradition and concept? Demonstrate technique? Teach a tune? What do you do with the inevitable experience gap in your attendees?
I spent Saturday afternoon in one of the absolute best workshops I've ever been at. Specifically this was playing Scottish music for country dance sets, which is a pretty specific application of a pretty specific subset of the world's (or even the fiddle player's) music repertoire. Yes, Tom Pixton is awesome. Even more key was that it was a nice small capable group, only four of us, perfectly capable of playing tunes, able to read music, familiar with the dances, and ready to just apply our potential for playing to actually doing it, and most important, we were all in more or less the same mental place. We'd gotten sheet music ahead of time - I was expecting "music packet for the workshop" to be a couple of tunes, but the pdf which arrived in my email was the entire Saturday night dance program. (Scottish dance - 1 evening = 14 dances = 14*(3-4 tunes) = ~45 tunes) The workshop was basically Tom explaining (enthusiastically) what he likes to see dance musicians do, and running us through a set of the tunes, stopping us to comment on how to add lift here, drive there, what makes the dancers happy, how to change tunes convincingly, etc. Then talking about what made that set of tunes and that dance different from this other dance, and its set of tunes, and playing through that set, with commentary, and onward. What was cracking me up the whole time was how fast he talks when he gets going, which was for the whole 2.5 hours. A great time was had by all.
And I got to go to Salem Beerworks twice in one day! (workshop, dinner, dance, drinks) A great way to spend a day.
I spent Saturday afternoon in one of the absolute best workshops I've ever been at. Specifically this was playing Scottish music for country dance sets, which is a pretty specific application of a pretty specific subset of the world's (or even the fiddle player's) music repertoire. Yes, Tom Pixton is awesome. Even more key was that it was a nice small capable group, only four of us, perfectly capable of playing tunes, able to read music, familiar with the dances, and ready to just apply our potential for playing to actually doing it, and most important, we were all in more or less the same mental place. We'd gotten sheet music ahead of time - I was expecting "music packet for the workshop" to be a couple of tunes, but the pdf which arrived in my email was the entire Saturday night dance program. (Scottish dance - 1 evening = 14 dances = 14*(3-4 tunes) = ~45 tunes) The workshop was basically Tom explaining (enthusiastically) what he likes to see dance musicians do, and running us through a set of the tunes, stopping us to comment on how to add lift here, drive there, what makes the dancers happy, how to change tunes convincingly, etc. Then talking about what made that set of tunes and that dance different from this other dance, and its set of tunes, and playing through that set, with commentary, and onward. What was cracking me up the whole time was how fast he talks when he gets going, which was for the whole 2.5 hours. A great time was had by all.
And I got to go to Salem Beerworks twice in one day! (workshop, dinner, dance, drinks) A great way to spend a day.