This announcement comes from David Romtvedt at Worlds of Music: Community Development Through Music:"On Thursday through Saturday, July 23-25, Worlds of Music will present a series of free workshops, performances, and talks along with a community dance featuring New England contra dance fiddler Rodney Miller and the Airdance Trio with dance caller Larry Edelman. All events will take place in Buffalo.
On Thursday Rodney Miller and the Airdance Trio will perform at 6:30 p.m. at the Occidental Hotel, 10 N. Main. On Friday, the musicians will perform and talk about their music at 12:45 p.m. at the Buffalo Senior Center, 671 W. Fetterman. On Saturday, both The Airdance trio and Larry Edelman will play for a community dance at 8 p.m., at Buffalo’s new Clear Creek Middle School, 361 W. Gatchell.
The visiting musicians will also offer two free workshops. On Friday from 3-5 p.m. at The Deerfield, 7 N. Main, Larry Edelman will teach songs and dances of the American Southwest. On Saturday from 10 a.m.-noon and from 1-3 p.m., again at The Deerfield, Rodney Miller, the Airdance Trio, and Larry Edelman will teach New England style contra dance music and contra dance calling. Local musicians including Buffalo guitarist and mandolinist Scott Gall and Sheridan fiddler and guitarist Mark Paninos will play for the callers’ workshop. The workshops are open to people of all ages and skill levels. Beginners are welcome as are all instruments. Participants in the workshops will have the opportunity to play at the Saturday night dance.
Contra dance has a long history in the United States from the colonial period to the present. The dances are done in lines in which couples face one another. The caller teaches each dance by walking people through the steps before the music starts. Throughout the tune, people dance alternately with their partner and with a new person until everyone has danced with everyone else in the room. Like many traditional dance forms, contras offer a way for people to meet and get to know one another. It’s both exciting and a little scary.
The music for contra dancing has long been played on fiddle and piano though contemporary bands may also include piano accordion, concertina, guitar, mandolin, percussion, and string bass. A blend of French Canadian and Celtic influences, the music has in the past twenty-five years begun to incorporate a wide array of musical styles including jazz and swing. One of these days we may find ourselves dancing to a contra dance band that includes salsa tunes and a horn section.
Rodney Miller is a leading player of contemporary New England style fiddling. Named a Master Fiddler by the National Endowment for the Arts, he has represented New Hampshire at the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, D.C. and has performed on "A Prairie Home Companion," at the Kennedy Center, and with the Twyla Tharp Dance Company. His festival appearances include Australia’s National Folk Festival, Faroe Islands Folk Festival, Shetland Folk Festival, Denmark’s Tonder Folk Festival, the US National Folk Festival, and the Festival of American Fiddle Tunes.
In Buffalo, Rodney Miller will perform with his daughter Elvie Miller, who plays piano and piano accordion, and with guitarist Owen Marshall. Elvie received a Watson Fellowship to study Irish traditional music and has recorded an all waltz cd called Spyglass with her father. Owen is a twenty-one year old guitarist who has performed with many New England dance bands. Caller Larry Edelman has served as the coordinator of Dance Week at West Virginia’s Augusta Heritage Arts Workshop and as program director of the Country Dance and Song Society's American Dance Week at Pinewoods in Massachusetts. He received a Folk Arts fellowship from the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts to study with elder caller Jerry Goodwin, and produced the film Dance to the Music and Listen to the Calls. He is the author of Square Dance Caller's Workshop and has played guitar, mandolin, and fiddle with The Monongahela Mudsuckers, Devilish Merry, the Percolators, and Poultry in Motion.
Rodney Miller, the Airdance Trio, and Larry Edelman’s visit to Wyoming is made possible by Worlds of Music, a not for profit program that seeks to understand what music means to people—why they listen to, dance to, and perform certain musics and not others. Worlds of Music performances, lectures, and workshops look at the role music plays in our lives, and how music changes over time and across cultures. Above all, Worlds of Music examines the ways that music is unique to particular communities while remaining a universal human phenomenon.
This Worlds of Music event is supported by private gifts as well as by grants from the Johnson County Arts and Humanities Commission and the Wyoming Arts Council through funding from the Wyoming legislature and the National Endowment for the Arts.
FMI: 307-684-2194 or 307-684-9406.
