It looks like Catskills Irish Arts Week in East-Durham have updated their
homepage and teaching staff page for 2006. Wow, what a lineup!
http://www.east-durham.org/irishartsweek/index.htm
See you there,
Tom
The only sad thing is that Mary Bergin won’t be there, and I’m not sure about Micheal Rooney. I got used to these folks in the past few years.
Michael Rooney is listed as a teacher, if you’re not sure he will be there. If you’re not sure about going to a festival he’s at, I can’t help you. 
Ahhh I’m glad to know he’ll be there. I only looked at the “general description” and not at the teacher’s list. So no Mary Bergin then? Darn.
I’m sure she heard I was coming and decided to skip it this year. 
I am really sad I will be out of town that whole time. 
Well, how sad could one be on a trip to Europe?
This year, I’d cancel the trip to Europe to go to the Catskills – my number one reason to go to Europe is going to be at CIAW.
Though I am rather sad it is going to force me to miss a session with Liz Carroll, John Doyle, the Heatons, and Grey Larsen.
The reason Catskills is one of my favorite festivals, beside the fact that I’ve got so many friends showing up there, is because of the listening session. It’s the only good festival I know of with listed listening sessions, where people are expected to sit and listen. I don’t like big noisy sessions invaded with tourists who can’t wait to play with the big stars, and the listening sessions give me great, lovely tunes I can work on the following year.
If only it were that easy.
Sadly, I will not be there this year owing to a conference.
I have instead signed up for the concertina boot camp w/ Noel Hill that happens later that summer in the same place.
I need that, being severely out of practice. I am sad that I will miss the opportunity to hang out with all the friendly folk there, but on the other hand I might have my secret science experiment concertina project done in time for the next one.
Caj
Huh. Not quite sure what I think of that. In my experiences at other festivals (without listening sessions), this hasn’t been much of an issue. (Possibly because I’ve never been to Willie Week!) The sessions usually sorted themselves out based on talent levels pretty quickly. And there is a lot to be learned playing with the people you’re ready to play with.
How does it work? Is it just a couple of different “featured” players each night?
So who’s going to be there, and should be have some tchunes when there?
Mark
Well, there’s a session list distributed at the beginning of the week, and most of the sessions are “open”, but all sessions have official leaders, most of them teachers. There is one listening session every night, while there’s plenty of open sessions elsewhere the same night. So every night you get maybe 5-6+ different sessions.
I wasnt as lucky with you with small sessions. Even the Ennis festival in november, which is supposed to be relatively quiet, was invaded with musicians. I don’t remember any session with less than 10 people. That’s too much for me. So a few friends and I ended up starting our own session in pubs, and when it was getting too crowded then we would “remember we had something to do” and went elsewhere.
Usually, when you know people, you end up being invited to private sessions and they’re the best.
Ah, certainly being willing to make your own session is an important part of the process!
That’s why we’re happy when a gang of us has critical mass, and we can always start a solid session if we can find a relatively quiet place to play. And I think last night it was confirmed that we will have that critical mass at the Catskills this year.
I have a question for those of you who have been there before. Or maybe several related questions.
I’m puzzling over the schedule trying to figure out what to take. My problem is that it doesn’t seem to offer any clue what class is about, just the instrument(s), level, and instructor. In my past experience with this sort of thing, some classes were primarily about teaching instrumental techniques for a particular instrument, but more were about teaching tunes, and the instrument was of secondary importance, if that. So for instance I’ve sat in Patrick Ourceau’s classes with my whistle any number of times now, picking up a bunch of nice tunes and simply resting when he starts talking about fiddle-specific techniques. But those classes were usually called something like “East Clare / Galway Advanced Fiddle” or “Patrick Ourceau Workshop”, not “Advanced Fiddle.”
In particular, I’m wondering if it would make sense for an advanced whistle player who is just starting out on flute to take Mike Rafferty or Catherine McEvoy’s advanced flute classes. I might not be able to handle the tunes on flute just yet, but 95% of any technique involved will translate directly whistle anyway, and the rest of it would with any luck be useful to me on flute in another year or two.
Does anyone have a notion about these things?
One of the facts of life at E Durham is that the so-called advanced classes are full of people who could not by any stretch of the imagination (my imagination anyway) be classed as advanced.
In previous years there have been guidelines posted to try to dissuade people from signing up for classes beyond their level. For an advanced class you are supposed to have students of your own, know at least 100 tunes and be capable of leading a session. (Which I suppose could mean whatever you want it to mean.)
I went to Mary’s class a few years ago and out of 12 in my group, I’d say only 2 were at the official qualifying level, and most of the others were many years away from it. So a couple of us spent a lot of time learning not very much at all while she taught really basic stuff to the turtles. What to do?
I’d say that if you meet the qualifications on another instrument, you shouldn’t be too shy of signing up for an instrument on which you don’t. You’ll be able to absorb what’s being taught and have the good sense not to allow yourself to hold the others back by taking up a disproportionate amount of the teacher’s time.
Anyway you could be surprised. I decided to stick my neck out and sign up for Jackie Daly’s “Intermediate/advanced” box class last year, banking on my ability on other instruments, but fully prepared to be told by the master to sod off to a beginner’s class. But in the event most participants were a lot farther back along the road to squeezing than I was! You have to feel sorry for the teachers sometimes… the price of fame?
Steve
On the Flute Forum there was a discussion about a Grey Larsen Workshop, and a newb Fluter was going to bring their Flute and Whistles. That might be the best way to go, as you can have the best of oth worlds.
Avery LeVine
I remember one of the teachers coming back (not sure it was Catskills or some other place she went to) giving out one night in Friel’s about the 50 US fiddlers (‘the acolytes’ she called them) swarming around Tommy Peoples, playing away instead of (as she said) listening and trying to learn something.
I was enlisted to do a weeklong piping workshop somewhere, some 13 or 14 years ago. One woman contacted me she wanted to sit in and ‘experience the pipes’ and would I lend her a practice set for the week. Apparently she sat in a different class every year to ‘experience’ a different instrument. I basically told her to feck off as it would probably take her a week to get a sound out of them. The organisers however, keen to have a paying customer I suppose, organised a practice set for her and told her to go for it.
I was pretty relieved to go home by the end of it and have steered clear of tionol invitations ever since.
In this specific instance, I think you’d be better off taking Mike Rafferty’s class, because he mainly teaches tunes (and typically loads of them!), whereas Catherine is more likely to get into technique, some of which would be quite flute-specific and wouldn’t transfer to the whistle. Catherine’s quite a good whistle player herself, by the way, and Mike’s no slouch either.
Thank you all for the solid advice!
The actual quote this year is
Advanced: You have been playing traditional Irish music for more than five years, may have played semi-professionally and are comfortable playing a hundred tunes. You might be a session leader in your own locality or have students of your own.
This actually really amused me. For me:
Playing more than five years? Check.
Played semi-professionally? Well, I’ve managed to make about $400 over six years of playing. I don’t think that can qualify as semi-professional.
Comfortable playing a hundred tunes? Well over that, I had over 200 when I last bothered to count back in 2001, no real idea how many any more.
Might be a session leader? Sure, more or less, though mostly less these days.
Have students of my own? Only years ago, when I didn’t yet realize how much I still had to learn for myself.
I guess that doesn’t really capture why I found it funny. It just seemed like it was a complete mismatch between how I feel about my playing and their criteria. In 2001 I could check off everything there but semi-professional (and even by then I’d already made over one-third of the total I’ve made so far), but back then I was still well inside what I today consider my “clueless” period. Don’t think it was until I got a copy of Music of Sligo in 2002 that I really started to realize what I had been missing.