NEFFA Festival
Apr. 21st, 2002 12:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
guslToday I spent 13 hours at the New England Folk Festival. It's been an hour since I left, and I have been abstaining from music since. However, I can still hear Irish tunes in my head.
I may have met a good fiddle teacher. He can play those flashy swing tunes such as "Ragtime Annie", "Down Yonder" and "Orange Blossom". If I can ever play these tunes decently, I will have achieved my goal.
So, part of the thrill in going to folk festival is seeing new stuff. Here's what I saw:
new styles heard: English country (almost classical-sounding with piano, fiddle and concertina), Hungarian, Finnish, Swedish, Russian, Cajun, Contra Dance. All styles had fiddles. I don't think I saw one jam without a fiddle the whole day (out of about 50).
new instruments heard: baroque bass, cimbalom, bass clarinet (I thought it was a bassoon), nyckelharpa (key fiddle), hurdy-gurdy (key fiddle with rotating cylinder instead of bow).
I probably played for about 5 hours the whole day. Can you guess where it hurt first? My knees. No joke. Standing for a long time hurts, probably more than walking.
Anyway, I kept wanting to leave, but there was always something else to distract me. When I first got the schedule, I had planned out exactly what events I wanted to attend, but I found it more pleasant to go with the flow.
I may have met a good fiddle teacher. He can play those flashy swing tunes such as "Ragtime Annie", "Down Yonder" and "Orange Blossom". If I can ever play these tunes decently, I will have achieved my goal.
So, part of the thrill in going to folk festival is seeing new stuff. Here's what I saw:
new styles heard: English country (almost classical-sounding with piano, fiddle and concertina), Hungarian, Finnish, Swedish, Russian, Cajun, Contra Dance. All styles had fiddles. I don't think I saw one jam without a fiddle the whole day (out of about 50).
new instruments heard: baroque bass, cimbalom, bass clarinet (I thought it was a bassoon), nyckelharpa (key fiddle), hurdy-gurdy (key fiddle with rotating cylinder instead of bow).
I probably played for about 5 hours the whole day. Can you guess where it hurt first? My knees. No joke. Standing for a long time hurts, probably more than walking.
Anyway, I kept wanting to leave, but there was always something else to distract me. When I first got the schedule, I had planned out exactly what events I wanted to attend, but I found it more pleasant to go with the flow.