Natalie MacMaster: Dynamic fiddle virtuoso

Few performers exhibit the excitement that marks Natalie MacMaster's shows. Less than a year after the birth of her fourth child, the Canadian fiddler brings "Christmas in Cape Breton" to George Mason University Center for the Arts, full of traditional Celtic music.

"I'm motivated by love and music that moves," she said. "I can be tired and the minute I get on stage I'm filled with energy. Growing up in Cape Breton, I enjoyed a very traditional Christmas. I remember going with my dad to the woods to get a tree that we hung with homemade decorations about the 20th of December. Then we went to our rooms to wrap gifts secretly while our mother baked cookies. We spent Christmas Day at our grandmother's house, then entertained visitors and went visiting. The next day, Boxing Day, we'd square dance."

MacMaster learned her instrument from her uncle Buddy MacMaster, the famous Cape Breton fiddler. Although her parents did not play, her father encouraged her to practice. To this day, she relies on him for criticism.

"He urged me to play correctly and even now may not agree with those who think my performance was perfect," she said. "But if he praises me, that approval is bigger to me than playing in Carnegie Hall. Even before I studied the fiddle, my mom taught me step-dancing. Sometimes if I sense the audience members are participatory, I invite some to join me on stage."

MacMaster grew up listening to pop, rock and jazz, so it's no wonder that she embraces them in her repertoire. Her collaborations with many celebrated artists reveal her expertise across the board.

"Being invited by Yo-Yo Ma to play on his Christmas CD, 'Songs of Joy and Peace,' was a big thrill for me," she said. "I loved playing with Alison Krauss, who is so sweet, and of course The Chieftains. They've been a big part of my formation and introduced me to a lot of American crowds."

As a mom, MacMaster limits her touring. Wherever she or her husband, Donnell, perform, one or more of the children accompany them, a tradition followed by the Leahy ensemble. Because she toured all fall, she is looking forward to a long break at home until a tour of Canada in March. For now, she will bask in the November release of "Cape Breton Girl" and the publication of her first book, "Natalie MacMaster's Cape Breton Aire."

"It's the story of how I grew up with awesome photography by photographer Eric Roth," she said. "His pictures are honest and fresh, not touristy. I want readers to see that place as it really is and I remember it. Even though I spent my early years there, I want my children to have their own memories of growing up in our home, the place where Santa comes every Christmas."

Read more at the Washington Examiner: http://washingtonexaminer.com/entertainment/music/2011/12/natalie-macmaster-dynamic-fiddle-virtuoso/2007731#ixzz1giPjml5Q


Natalie MacMaster: Dynamic fiddle virtuoso | Washington Examiner

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Don’t listen to this man if you want ‘diddly dee’ fiddling...

Rob Adams talks to Caoimhin O Raghallaigh, one of the star attractions at this weekend’s Fiddle 2009 Festival

Edinburgh’s Assembly Rooms will be thronged from Friday to Sunday this weekend as fiddle players and listeners alike gather to celebrate the continuing popularity of the instrument and its music in the capital’s annual fiddle festival.

It was at a gathering similar to this that a young musician had his enthusiasm re-fired by a group of players his own age, a re-firing that has led to Caoimhin O Raghallaigh emerging as arguably the most fascinating Irish musician of his generation.

There’s a tendency for those who don’t care for traditional fiddle music – and some who do but with a more ironic inflection – to refer to it as “diddly dee” music.

Making music is like painting sound onto a canvas of time
Caoimhin O Raghallaigh
O Raghallaigh doesn’t do “diddly dee”. He can and loves to play all the traditional tune types with great skill, but his mission goes beyond the tradition.

His belief is that people without any interest or background in traditional music can be drawn into fiddle music and his approach is more that of a poet with sound. There’s a bit of the poet with words in the thirty-year-old Mr O Raghallaigh, too.

“Making music is like painting sound onto a canvas of time,” he says in a quote that, if he hasn’t already done so, he should copyright pronto.

O Raghallaigh was once almost lost to making music. Growing up in Dublin with parents who didn’t play instruments but had spent much of their courtship driving for miles around County Clare to see concertinist Noel Hill and fiddler Tony Linnane and bands like Planxty, the Chieftains and the Bothy Band, he was accustomed to hearing Irish traditional music through the many LPs there were at home. One particular musician, however, captured his imagination.

Hearing a young John Kelly playing The Marino Waltz, a tune composed by The Dubliners’ John Sheahan, on a TV commercial, O Raghallaigh decided that he, too, should play the fiddle.

After much pleading for fiddle lessons, his mother took him to the classes that traditional music advocates Comhaltas ran nearby but, at eight, he was considered too young at the time and was told to come back in two years. The pleading continued, so his mother tried a classical violin teacher.

“I arrived for my first lesson full of enthusiasm, with a manuscript copy of The Marino Waltz in my hand,” says O Raghallaigh. “The teacher was horrified by this piece of music.

“Instead of nurturing my enthusiasm, she turned it to stone in double quick time, I’m afraid. Inspiring she was not. Her final comment to my mother was: ‘You’re wasting your money and my time. He’ll never be a musician’.”

And that might have been that but for his parents, two years later, taking him to a festival in Gormanstown, where he heard a bunch of young fiddlers sounding – he thought – great and having a lot of fun.

Another teacher was found who, this time, opened the door to the world of Irish music, including sessions where the youngster would sit with a group of much older, wiser heads, playing as quietly as possible with his ear to his instrument, trying to fit into the rhythms of jigs, reels, hornpipes, polkas and slides.

In his mid teens O Raghallaigh began to feel, much as he loved playing the fiddle and by this time, the tin whistle and flute too (he later added the uilleann pipes), that the music he was playing was lifeless.

“I realised that nobody was going to teach me how to change that,” he says. “It was up to me to figure it out for myself. So I went in search of music that really excited me. I tried to immerse myself totally in it and try to grasp some fundamental difference between it and the music I was making.”

His quest took him, after leaving school, to a transition year work experience post in the Irish Traditional Music Archives in Dublin where, while working as an archivist, he was able to listen over and over to old recordings, especially of fiddle players from the Sliabh Luachra district on the Cork-Kerry border, County Clare musicians including fiddler Patrick Kelly and piper Willie Clancy, and sean-nos (old style) singers.

All through his student years at Trinity College, where he graduated in theoretical physics, O Raghallaigh continued working in the archives during the holidays and continued to immerse himself in the tradition.

“The thing that really interested me about truly great traditional music was not the notes I heard, but how it made me feel and the state of mind it created in you as a listener,” he says. Not for him, then, the pursuit of speed as a means of making traditional music more exciting.

“Well, if the thing that interests you about traditional music is the notes, then it makes perfect sense that you’d want to play as many of them as possible, as fast as possible,” he says. “But if the thing that interests you is the state of mind created, I think it makes sense to create the kind of music I’m creating now.

“There are many other aspects of the tradition that are integral to the music I make, aspects which many other people have not chosen to keep, such as a particular sense of time and space, an idiosyncratic and internally coherent sense of intonation, and an unsterilised idea of what constitutes acceptable tone.

“I think of music much more in terms of sound than in terms of notes.”

In this he shares an approach with Norwegian fiddler Nils Okland, whose tour earlier this year for the Scottish Arts Council’s Tune-up programme proved a revelation. O Raghallaigh and Okland also share a common instrument, the Norwegian hardanger fiddle, to which O Raghallaigh was introduced while working on a particle accelerator project in America in 2000.

With its wide tonal range and the effect of its sympathetic strings, which allow O Raghallaigh to incorporate the drones of the uilleann pipes into his fiddle playing, the hardanger might have been invented for his new music, albeit music that comes from deep in the tradition.

“Nils and me are not the only ones doing this,” he says. “All over the world, in other folk music traditions, there are people writing really interesting contemporary music which is very obviously directly related to folk music but isn’t necessarily folk music.

“My album Where the One-Eyed Man Is King opened up a whole new listenership. They don’t need a background in traditional music to get it. So I’m trying to communicate to people who might have switched off.”

Caoimhin O Raghallaigh plays at the Assembly Rooms, Edinburgh on Saturday at 10pm and Sunday at 3pm. For information on Fiddle 2009, log onto www.scotsfiddlefestival.com

http://www.heraldscotland.com/arts-ents/music-features/don-t-listen-to-this-man-if-you-want-diddly-dee-fiddling-1.931973

Siobhan Peoples Interview

Mad For Playing

An Interview by Brendan Taffe

Siobhan Peoples is a mighty fiddle player, and a highlight of a trip to Ennis for many a musical tourist has long been the chance to hear her play in a session around town. With the recent release of a duet album with accordion player Murty Ryan, Time On Our Hands, many more people will have the pleasure of hearing her play. She is also a strong argument for a gene of musical talent that's yet to be found on the DNA maps: her father, of course, is the legendary Tommy Peoples, and her grandmother on her mother's side was Kitty Linnane, the piano player with the storied Kilfenora Ceili Band. For all that one might expect a certain quest for fame, or sense of self-importance, but Siobhan is interested only in the music. In her own words, she's "mad for it." We met over a cup of tea in Queen's Hotel, Ennis, County Clare, Ireland.
How did you get started playing the fiddle?

'Twould have been from hearing it from a very young age. We lived with my grandparents until I was about seven. My grandmother was Kitty Linnane, who played piano with the Kilfenora Ceili Band and the band would have been pretty active at that time. I mean they were old, but they still practiced an awful lot. We moved to Toonagh then, and Frank Custy was the headmaster in school there. Everybody who went through the school played something. You would start on whistle, and then pick something and they would teach you the basics.

Was it your idea to start on the fiddle, or your father's?

I think it was just the obvious choice. I was about seven, so I don't think it was based on choice as such. It would have been Frank that gave me the fiddle at first and probably because Dad played it and he played it himself.

So, all of your mates at school played traditional music?

Everyone at the school learnt and played something. At the time, you weren't allowed to give it up until you left, but Frank just involved everybody. We would have gotten together a lot for competitions; ceili bands and duets and trios. Frank had children my age, so there were a few of us that were very interested and it was very easy to keep it up.

Which is quite different from players a generation older, who didn't have anyone to play with.

I had a bit of that later on, in my teenage years. I suppose that was the early '80s, and even people that did play didn't talk about it much. But I was mad for playing. I'd have been out all the time, but it was always with older people.

The other teenagers wouldn't admit to it?

We were all at school, and in some families you had to concentrate on your studies. But I was a bit rebellious that way. My grandmother, Kitty Linnane, would invite little groups to play; like keyboard and three musicians. I would have played with them a good bit from an early age, twelve or thirteen, and then with Dad as well. At about sixteen or seventeen, I branched away from family and met up with a few of my own friends and started to play with them. But it was always in a very safe environment and always very local; around here and in North Clare: Kilfenora, Corofin, Lisdoonvarna, Doolin.

Apart from being a fiddler in your own right, what's it like to be the daughter of such a renowned fiddle player?

Growing up I would never have noticed it, because I was so mad to learn what he knew, and was just mad for playing anyway that I would have kind of inhaled it. If Dad was playing at home I would have listened. I was mad to learn so I would have picked up a lot of his accent, his fiddle-playing accent. Then I would still have been a teenager, doing gigs with him in Dublin and meeting people. I think the problem was more with other people than with us. They'd say, "Ah, you play just like your father." Well, I don't really. "Ah, you do, you do." But you didn't play well enough like him, and you'd never be as good as him, and all this kind of thing, or you have to be better than him. It was never just, "Enjoy your fiddle-playing." It was always comparisons, and that was difficult.

The pressure of it.

Well, when you're young it's a pressure because you're only learning. You're a teenager; you're not even fully formed in thought or anything else, so you're kind of learning all the sames before you find out what your differences are -- outside of fiddle-playing. I suppose it would have undermined me a little bit at that time, but I wouldn't worry about it so much now. It still goes on, but it doesn't bother me.

Because you're more comfortable in what your own style is.

Absolutely. It's always going to be very Peoples-based. You know you can't get away from your family, nor would I have any desire to. I'm just more comfortable with the thought that other people have nothing better to be doing than comparing us.

Outside of family, who were major influences on your playing?

Frank Custy was a big influence. For fiddle players, I'd love all the northern connection -- Paddy Glackin, and any Donegal fiddle player you'd want to mention. Locally, Dad would have been the biggest; Paul O'Shaugnessy; this guy Maurice Bradley from Derry; my cousin James Gibson. When I heard Steve Cooney [the guitar player], he would have been a major influence, just because of the change of chord progressions. You went from a nice, safe piano and guitar back-up to mayhem, and it just seemed to suit my brain completely.

How did those chord progressions influence your fiddle playing?

It just opens up so much more possibility in a tune. Most of my variations would have been based on chord progressions, and when those chords were blown apart, and suddenly they're putting in notes that you've never heard of in that scale, or never heard played on a piano -- it would have influenced even the tunes that I write. I've been told since that a waltz I wrote sounds very Swedish. I've never sat down and listened to Swedish music, but it certainly doesn't sound like an old Irish tune.

I was very lucky in that I'm in the same age group as Dermot Byrne and Michelle O'Sullivan. I think when you see people your own age pushing out boundaries, influences are more about possibilities than actually copying something. You have to copy initially before you can adopt it to your own, but I think it's that they give more possibilities than actual ways of how to play something.

You've had some trouble with your left hand?

I lost the power of two fingers -- just for fiddle playing. They're perfect otherwise. It's just such a controlled space and a very small space, very limited, and the hand just kind of said "No." It was like that for a long time and just progressively got worse. I went to lots of people who could tell me what it wasn't, but there didn't seem to be much of a fix for it. So I just developed my own style of playing after that, which is basically with two fingers. I use these two, my index and middle finger mainly, and I have some little power back in this [ring finger] now, so I could use that for high B's. I'm going between first and second position all the time; it's not as difficult as it sounds. If you saw it, you wouldn't actually notice it. I position between the two, so it's all in the wrist.

And you can still get the rolls and the ornaments?

There's lots of things I can't do.

When did you first have that trouble?

When I was about sixteen or seventeen, I'd get a cramp, but it would be gone after a couple of minutes. Then a couple of years later it just kind of gave up altogether. I think a lot of it was panic. When I'd take out the fiddle I'd just tense up because I didn't know what was going to happen; you couldn't rely on it to be right.

Was there a period of time where you couldn't play at all?

I still can't play, if you know what I mean. I can play, but not play the fiddle the way it should be played. When I went to start to go to see people, they'd check and all this stuff and the first question was should I stop. They all said no, can't see any benefit in you stopping, because it wasn't anything obvious. So it probably did stop me from playing, but I didn't stop, if that's understandable.

How long did it take to develop this two-fingered style?

Ah sure, it was like learning all over again. I'd still be improving at it if you know what I mean, but it took a good few years. When you've learned something and then you have to do it differently, you have to forget about how you used to do it in the first place. I wasn't doing that with the two fingers and it sounded horrendous. Once I had kind of forgotten, I suppose, I started to learn. It's basically just having the trust in your judgment. I had everything else, and knew where everything was on the fiddle, but it was just judgment.

How do you think your style has changed because of that process?

Well, it obviously differs because of the physical limitations. I can't really do third finger rolls; even with the adapted style, it's a hard stretch. My style now is an awful lot simpler than it used to be, because it's limited, but I think in a way it helped me to listen to rhythm more. I hadn't many options when I couldn't do the stuff I wanted to do, so you have look for something else. Before it would have all been getting out your books and learning the positions. You want to conquer your instrument and that kind of thing. I couldn't do that, so I just got into the whole idea that basically all the tunes are there, but they're just a way of expressing the same couple of rhythms all the time. I've definitely concentrated on my bow hand more -- I'm still in the process of it, if you know what I mean, but I had come through the whole re-learning thing and come to a point where I could sit in any session. It's in the last couple of years that I'd be concentrating more on the power of the bow hand, realizing that it's half the instrument, rather than just something to express what you do with your fingers.

Has the scene here in Ennis changed since you were a teen?

Oh God, yeah. I used to do a night with Dad on a Tuesday in Brogan's, a pub that had a history of music. I'd say there was about five or six sessions a week back then in the whole town, and that would have been good. Cruise's opened here, next door, about eleven years ago, and it was strictly traditional seven nights a week. It was just great. For us locally we'd go in there, and they wanted you there for your music. Then some festivals started running, and the next thing people started moving to Ennis. I suppose economically the country was doing so well that it was easier to stay around; there wouldn't have been much here work-wise to keep musicians here earlier. I'd say you have four or five times the amount of musicians in the environs at the moment than you ever would have before. It's as good as anywhere else. ...

Now that that's done, and you've relearned how to play with fewer fingers, are there things you're hoping to do next, musically?

I'm thirty-one years of age, and I've been playing professionally for twenty of that. Part of me is screaming for a break from it all, and if I was to do that I don't where I'd end up afterwards. If I was to keep playing, I'd love to develop it more in a concert setting. In sessions, you're playing against loud noise in a pub setting. So I wouldn't mind doing it on a more intimate level, so that I could hear it and they could hear it, and there's more interaction. Now I think I'd actually like that, but I'd have to wait until the wee ones are a bit bigger. We'll be practicing around Ireland for a while before we take off with our big bus.

I'm lucky in a way because music has been in my family for so long. My grandmother did it as well; that was her career, outside of raising a family, and it's probably more acceptable for me to do it. I'm the third generation of it in my family, so it wouldn't be as strange for me as for someone who's the first musician in their family and suddenly they want to leave their kids somewhere for a week and head off playing music. There would be very much a sense of purpose -- I'm very grateful to my family in that way, that they're very accepting of what I do, and that I need to go away sometimes to play. I'd like to at least have the girls sitting in school, and more on their feet.

You feel a sense of purpose when you're playing?

Well, I mean I love it, really. If I was never to play professionally I wouldn't care; I don't know was I ever meant to sit on the world and proclaim from the fiddle. There are musicians that need to do that, and are here for that. I'd be quite happy just playing away here, if it didn't become the same old stuff all the time, just as long as there's a bit of a choice.

[For the full text of this interview and Siobhan's tune "Nicos' Mermaid," subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!]

[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. www.brendantaaffe.com]