Sunday night in the rain I drove to Egremont for a concert of contradance musicians — the opening of Berkshire Summer Strings — and walked into one of my favorite memories.
Erika Ludwig, a teacher of stringed instruments in Great Barrington, wants to start a folk festival in the Berkshires. And she told me she’s inspired to do it after spending a week at Maine Fiddle Camp. Five young musicians will teach this week of children’s camp and adult workshops, and at least three of them are Fiddle Camp regulars.
I’ve been there too.
When I lived in New Hampshire, getting my MFA from UNH, I went up two summers running.
Five days in a tent uner the white pines, five days learning music by ear with a group of whistle players, five days of concerts and jams and gingerbread and not enough sleep — it’s a natural high.
When you go camping, you fall off the world. When you go camping with 200 fiddlers, you wake up with reels in your head for days after. Last week was out of time, intense, stunning in all senses of the word. It was so large, I haven’t been able to write about it since Friday; I had to get my head back on first. So I’m going to try, and I don’t know how long this will be.
I carpooled up with Peter on the Sunday, a week ago. We stopped for late-growing strawberries (did you know they existed? I didn’t) and pizza with chunks of local red peppers on the way.
Maine Fiddle Camp happens along a lake a couple of hours north of Portland. You come in on a dirt wood road to a line of red cabins opposite a yellow and white striped tent. The red dining hall, arts and crafts building and nurse’s station sit back along the lake shore with white pine between. White square pavillions poke among the cabins.
Sunday afternoon, the first of 200 fiddlers, cellists, basses, banjo players, mandolin pickers, pipers, guitarists, pianists and two violas were pitching tents along the lake and around the corner, down the wood road, in clearnings full of pine needles and unripe blackberries.
We got our tents up eventually and went along for a snack in the dining hall. We had dinner with French Canadian musicians Peter knows and talked about trying to understand each others’ accents. I learned the French for goose bumps (qui s’appelle char de poule, je crois?)
And let me say now, the food was marvelous all week. Granola and muffins and cinnamon rolls and different pancakes every breakfast, and homemade hummus and salads and breads at lunch, and corn and white fish and mussels and pesto at night. It helps to have fishermen on the staff. Two of them stayed up til 4 or so at the last all-night jam and had to be out oystering at 5. They also had two gigs back to back that night. The energy these people have — well, you’ll see. I hope you’ll see.
Sunday night, the staff all played for us. Some of the staff have been playing contradance music for 40 years and more; many of them played together as the Maine Country Dance Orchestra in the ’70s. Others of the staff, the ones who were my age, have been coming to this camp since they were fourteen and make a living this way. They’re friendly, good enough to joke through the music and talk with it and make you forget time — and intimidating.
And still more of the staff came down from Quebec. I’ve wanted to see Canada for years — I want to take the ten hour trian ride north from Labrador and count waterfalls and dig up garnets on the lake shores and wave at P.E.I. — but now I want to dance in Quebec city. The Quebecois fiddlers had a light, warm energy in their playing, heart Teresa said, and they looked delighted to be there.
Their dances have a sense of humor, even; we danced one Thursday night. The line of women circles the line of men, and then when the line of men circles back they each get to spin the woman at the top of the set….
But that’s later. Sunday Doug, the guy who runs the camp, sang a reminder about the curfew called Hang on the Bell Nellie. He started out playing piano for silent movies, and he played all the sound effects. He opened a concert among the staff.
So we listened for an hour or two. When the concert broke up, people wandered into jam sessions. Peter and I sat listening to the small one in the main tent. And sometime in, they picked Star of Munster. This may be the only tune in the world I can play a harmony on (because the tune is based on a simple scale, and all you have to do is play a scale a third up). So I joined in. And I could feel the energy in the music, feel it change in answer to what I played, feel it gather speed and slow again.
I haven’t done that often, and not for years. When I played with Rude Cider, every once in a hunter’s moon, when we were playing for a dance and high with it, we got there. We could talk with the music; we could feel each other. And I knew how a tune worked somehow, and I could play notes that weren’t melody but belonged in it. One of the many things I learned last week is that I miss that feeling. Another is that since I never knew how I got there, I never felt or feel confident about being able to get back. But I’m working on it.
Another thing I learned — if you’re an introvert camping with 200 people, it helps to have a couple of safe, gentle people you know well and can sit quietly with. And it’s essential to have somewhere that’s yours alone. And a couple of self-inflating pads make a tent surprisingly comfortable to sleep in. My drunken pentagonal squash-fronted shelter stood up to thunderstorms too. We had a decent one Tuesday night. It’s comforting and unnerving when the rain on the roof is falling two feet over your head.
Every day began at 7:30 a.m. We had breakfast and coffee, and then we grabbed chairs from the main tent and rolled off to morning workshops. They divide everyone into small groups. If there are enough people, they divide the groups by ability. The fiddlers, by far the largest group, they also split by age. The level 6 adults are very good, but the level 6 youth are frankly scary. The fiddles have an hour every morning with their main teacher, then a second hour with someone new, and a third hour with their morning teacher after lunch. I was a whistler. (That turns out to be a duck. Every group had a local bird name. Peter played with the buffleheads and Teresa with the cormorants.)
I wound up with Sharon, who plays the tin whistle and the wooden Irish flute, and a group of all sizes: a 5-year-old girl and 7-year-old boy who had never played before; a boy about 12, friendly and gentle with the small ones, who could do more than he thought he could; a girl about 12 who had learned by ear, knew selkie stories and the words to the Skye boar song, and waltzed in the evenings with a white stuffed seal; the 5-year-old’s mother, a comforting person who had never played whistle but had played flute and picked things up fast… and me.
We learned a couple of traditional whistle tunes and a couple of Old Suzannah kinds of tunes, and the three of us who had the best grip on things would wander off, pull up a tree stump and practice while Sharon taught the newer ones.
I learned some new ornamentation — especially that you can cut or trill with any finger in a note. I’d always gone from an adjacent one, but you can cut from an A to an F easily if you flick the right finger. Also that you never want to wash a wooden recorder. (oops.) Almond oil can keep it from drying out. And it’s easy to learn by ear if someone teaches you a tune phrase by phrase.
We always played by ear, you see. I never learned this way until the fiddle jam in New Hampshire. In college we had a smaller repetoire, and we played them all over and over again. Now I know more tunes a lot less well. I learned that by sitting alone in the woods and trying to remember something besides Star of Munster to play. I can hear something and follow, but I can’t lead. Next assignment….
After lunch, I sat in with the beginning piano players and learned a few basic things about chords. No one ever talked to me about them, since I can’t play more than one note at once. But I realized that in Rude Cider I could work out basic harmonies because I could see the notes and because the chords were usually written in. So if I can figure out what key a tune’s in, and then what some basic chords are likely to be… maybe I can start playing counterpoints again. I miss that too. I started taking notes.
In the afternoons, we had a break and then staff and guest musicians would offer workshops, anything they wanted for anyone who would come — silly sounds, yodelling, basics on diffrent instruments, tunesmithing, jigs, foot percussion, step dancing. Monday and Tuesday I played casual tunes with Bernie from our jam session and his friend Frank who had a recorder along with his fiddle. Tuesday, Liam joined us. Liam is about three months old and about as long as his recorder, but he can get a few notes out when he’s not teething on it.
We had longer staff concerts after dinner, before or after the shortcake or gingerbread or blueberry crumble. Then dancing and jamming. A lot of children no older than the small whistlers made arches for 6-foot bass players to duck through. A giant in a tunic and long golden hair, a viking in training, danced with a boy about five who might have been Indian. Simple, fast-moving dances, lots of sashaying up and down the hall, and the band ranged all along two walls of the room. Then last concerts and rolling home. And I’ve rarely been so glad to be able to crawl into bed or so ready to leave it when the morning is still cold.
Tuesday Teresa came up, and I started hanging out in fiddle sessions in the afternoon. Hanging out with the Quebeçois teachers and the fiddlers was some of the very best of the week. These were the musicians at my speed. I bounced around between the kids and the staff in other places; here, with fiddlers in their late 30s and on up, I could pick up tunes well enough to follow, and the teachers would tease me enough to make me welcome — I don’t hear the bowing. UP up down! — and the music had an upswing in it. Peter leant me a tape recorder, so I can go back and really learn the tunes I was following. But I can pick up a tune by ear at dance tempo, if I hear it a few times. Sometimes it takes more than a few, and knowing the key helps. But I can.
I can also perform. Right after lunch, and again after the dancing at night, the campers had concerts. Anyone could sign up. Sharon got us on stage several times to play simple tunes with the beginning fiddlers. Then Tuesday night, when I was feeling on my mettle (no, really, I can play something at dance speed!) the last act didn’t come. The MC asked if anyone wanted to fill in, so I did.
Have you ever had your throat tighten with nervousness, until it got hard to breathe? I didn’t know I would be that nervous. I could speak all right. I’ve performed on stage before, but always with a band, always with someone else who knew the melody line. I played a couple of Swedish tunes I barely knew with Peter and Teresa on Thursday, and that went better. I’d like to get in my own way less, though. More to work on.
What day am I on? Wednesday, an Irish piper came. I joined a jam session with fiddles tuned down to C and learned that a C instrument plays naturally in C. The recorder’s a C instrument, though it’s chromatic (new word for the week!) and most fiddle music isn’t in C. And when a piper leads a jam, someone in the room’s guaranteed to be a playing a melody line that doesn’t get lost in rhythm. I like the Quebecois music better than some of the traditional Irish tunes, but I like the sound of the fiddles tuned down lower. I went to the Irish jam session that night in an open-beam barnlike room full of lamplight.
People came all week. A fiddler and luthier who had injured a finger asked Erik, one of the Quebecois fiddlers, to play a fiddle he’d made. Callers who’d kept contradance alive in the ’40s and ’50s taught us to dance the willow tree. Thursday… two fiddlers who had played since before the second world war swapped stories about playing for beer in London during the blitz and fixing a friend’s fiddle during a shift at the paper mill between jobs. They knew the same tunes in different keys, or with different third parts.
Thursday night I started to hit my limit for people and movement and sound, and I went to bed early. I missed the last Quebeçois jam session and the 4 a.m. polka … another time, I’ll go for longer walks earlier in the week.
Friday, we wound down, and I did go for a walk. The whistlers had practiced our hardest piece for the final concert, and we had an hour, and I got on a wood road and kept going. I ended up in a clearing with broken branches between the wild strawberry plants.
I sat down at the far edge, meaning to play. And I had to wait. A low-voiced bird or a chipmunk was keeping a dance rhythm behind me. The cicadas set up a mid-range hum, and another higher bird called in 4/4 time. This was worth the whole week: I’d been thinking with my ears for five days, and now, alone in the woods, I could hear. I could hear how dance music could have come out of the woods. I could hear sounds on sounds.
More than watching an older brother take his younger brother’s hand and find him lunch, more than watching Erik play the spoons and then hand out assorted spoons to four musicians arranged by height, more than the music I played and danced to and listened to and began in a small way to understand… sitting there in the strawberries got through, somehow.
Last concert, last polka and waltz, everyone running arund saying goodbye. Think of the end of a New Year’s weekend party, only New Year’s has gone on twice as long, and you’ve had to be on for it all, and you only know three people in the room. And it’s cool, and a shower moves through, and everyone is shaking your hand, saying it’s a pleasure, looking for extension cords to wind up. And then you get the tent down, and the sky is grey and clear and coming on stormy, with that heavy yellow light under the clouds and a double rainbow if you can believe it.
And you’re trying haltingly to put the week into words before it gets away from you, even though it will be crowding your head for days, because it won’t be this fresh.
I rode with Peter as far as Portland and talked about the kind of music I’d play if I could. We stopped with Teresa at the same pizza place, and the week dropped out from under me. They had both stayed up through the last jam session, and I was supposed to keep them awake. I rode with Teresa to Dover, and she sang me the Skye boat song, and we talked hazily about picts, pixies, leprechauns and trolls and lily pads. Then I rejoined my luggage for the last bit home.
And somehow we all held each other and somehow my tent made it inside and somehow my cat was indoors and my first brand new roommate was talking Chinese politics with my old roommate in the livingroom … and I didn’t have to think anymore, for a night and a day.