The latest entry in our Homegrown Plus series features Celtic duo Rakish. As usual, it includes a concert video, an interview video, and a set of links to explore. Rakish is made up of violinist Maura Shawn Scanlin and guitarist Conor Hearn. Maura and Conor draw on the music they grew up with and perform it in a way that reflects their shared interest in and love for chamber music as well as improvised music. Maura Shawn, a two-time U.S. National Scottish Fiddle Champion, and a winner of the Glenfiddich Fiddle Competition, has the technical range of a classical violinist and the sensitivity of a traditional musician. Conor, a native to the Irish music communities of Washington, D.C. and Baltimore, MD, makes his home in Boston playing guitar for several traditional music acts and bands. Using musical form and harmonic language as focal points, Rakish demonstrate the influence and overlap between dance music and airs from Britain and Ireland and art music or classical music from surrounding countries. The concert included musical dance forms and tune types including jigs, reels, hornpipes, and airs, arranged from written collections to be performed on the fiddle and guitar. In the interview, we talked about how Rakish prepared for this concert. using musical transcriptions from The American Folklife Center and the Library’s Music Division, including late baroque and early galant music. Watch the concert and interview right in this blog post!
We continue the Homegrown Plus series with the duo of Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas, who perform their own unusual arrangements of traditional and original Scottish and American folk music on fiddle and cello. Alasdair Fraser has a concert and recording career spanning over 30 years, with a long list of awards, accolades, radio and television credits, and feature performances on top movie soundtracks, including Last of the Mohicans and Titanic. In 2011, he was inducted into the Scottish Traditional Music Hall of Fame. Natalie Haas, a graduate of the Juilliard School of Music, is one of the most sought after cellists in traditional music today, and has performed and recorded with Mark O'Connor, Natalie MacMaster, Irish supergroups Solas and Altan, Liz Carroll, Dirk Powell, Brittany Haas, Darol Anger, Laura Cortese, and many more. Together, the duo of Fraser & Haas has helped reconstruct and revive a longstanding Scottish tradition of playing dance music on violin and cello. For their socially distanced concert, they performed some music solo and some using studio technology to join up separate performances, but most of it is never-before-released concert footage from their archive of pre-pandemic performances. In the interview, we discuss their separate musical histories as well as their 20-year career as a duo.
This post is part of the series Hidden Folklorists. In the series Hidden Folklorists, we’ll profile people who have a surprising connection to folklife and folklife scholarship; surprising, because many of them are famous for other activities. From the earliest days of the discipline, folklife scholarship, in both senses of “collecting folklore materials” and “performing …
For the last two weekends of November, 2016, AFC was honored to be featured on The Thistle & Shamrock, the long-running and popular Celtic music show produced and hosted by Fiona Ritchie and distributed by NPR. If you want to hear the shows, follow the links to part 1 here and part 2 here. The …
