Smoked Country Jam 2012 - Festival Days

5 days of music, 5 days of camping, hanging out by the campfire, talking to friends.  The 9th annual Smoked Country Jam took place last weekend at the Quiet Oaks Campground in Cross Forks, PA.  We've been to 6 of them, starting when Gus was 2 and Huck was an infant.  This is where Gus saw his first fiddle and learned his first fiddle tune.  As soon as we arrived, Theresa handed us a copy of this newspaper.  Wow!  That's a lot of newspaper article!  I thought they just needed some quotes for an article about Smoked Country Jam.  I wasn't sure what to make of it at first.  In fact, I didn't get brave enough to read it until almost a day later.  I still feel a little bit sheepish about it, but I think some really good things came of it.  The article highlighted our family's 100 day, turned 450 day and still rolling, practice challenge.  I think there is a whole blog post lurking about that topic, so I'll save it for later. 

In the meantime here are some pictures of our favorite things about Smoked Country Jam 2012:

  learning a new fiddle tune,

relaxing and watching the music,

 cooking hot dogs on the campfire,

 warming up by the big fire,

 sharing our favorite festival with Grammy and Papa Fred,

 being disappointed to not win the Chinese auction, and then getting a gift from one of the Chinese auction winners,

 watching the music with a new buddy,

and staying up way too late every night.

This year Gus was honored to play on stage with Mama Corn, the Poe Valley Troubadours, and the Hillbilly Gypsies.  I'll post some audio files and video as soon as I get unpacked and find the video camera.
 

When its Working...and When Its Not

Its been pretty quiet around here, both online and in the living room.  My excuse for not posting for the last couple weeks is a broken camera.  I decided to do some research to buy a new one today, picked up the old one and was very surprised to find that it worked again.  I guess it just needed to rest for a couple of weeks.  I admit that I don't understand how the camera really works (I understood my old 35 mm), and I don't know why it was only taking pictures in shades of orange, so I'll just be pleasantly surprised that it works and not ask any questions.

I guess I should take the same attitude about family band, because for a couple of weeks it wasn't working either, not at all.  We couldn't play a single song together without someone getting mad and stomping off.  I started to cringe when I even thought about trying to play music together.  Then, the other night, we started playing music on the porch and it was a blast.  It worked!  No one argued.  Everyone sounded all right.  No one tried to hard to be "boss".  It was fun again.  And the next night, still fun.  Tonight, better than fun.  We took turns flipping through a song book and attempted to play whatever we fell open to.  We learned some new songs.  We played some songs we had forgotten about.  It worked.  No questions asked?
 
As I uploaded the pictures for this post, I realized the camera isn't quite fixed.  Its better, but there are still some grainy orangy shots.  It might not work tomorrow.  I know that family band is like that too.  Today its working, but like the camera, it's a complicated machine made out of a bunch of parts and if one of the parts is out of sorts the result is likely to be kind of off.

Well, here are some pictures of what it looks like when both the camera and the music are working.

 

Wordless Wednesday - music yesterday

Clanker Band

Barn Boys Band, trying so hard to get that one drum beat at the right time in the riff.

Making Music Together Increases Kids Empathy

This morning I came across a really interesting article, "Making Music Together Increases Kids Empathy."

http://www.psmag.com/culture/making-music-together-increases-kids-empathy-41627/

Wow!  Something that we're doing every day can increase our empathy.  I say "our", because we've already decided that learning music is just as good for parents as kids.  This is particularly good news, because, being a sucker for parenting books, I tried to read a book about Emotional Intelligence, and I just didn't get very far.  Not that I didn't think it was important, but the book didn't grab me and I felt a little bad about it.

I'm not going to reiterate the article.  You should go read it. I'm just going to agree with it.  Kids in Suzuki violin are nicer than other kids.  In fact, in four years of group classes, I can't think of a single instance of one child being unkind to another.  The kids at Suzuki Institute and Fiddle Camp, too.  All really nice kids.  I've commented on it and just chalked it up to good luck, "Boy, what a nice bunch of kids in the boys' group classes this year, so supportive and fun," and "You can't ask for a more fun bunch at camp."  

Mountain Road Fiddle Camp 2011

It's surprising because Suzuki violin is inherently competitive.  
"What song are you on?"
"I just finished Book 1 and you're STILL on Minuet 3."
But the competition just seems to spur them on, in a positive way.

Suzuki Institute 2011

People often ask me if Huck is jealous and competitive of Gus' music.  He isn't, at least not in that, "He got a bigger piece of chocolate cake than I did," sort of way that brothers are notorious for.  In fact, I think he's Gus' biggest fan.  

In part, it is because Huck has his peers in his class to compete with.  He and a friend have been neck-to-neck since they learned to play Twinkle, and now they're both finishing up Gossec Gavotte.  When either of them performs a solo for their group class, the other watches attentively and claps louder than anyone else in the group!  That alone is a wonderful lesson, to compete in a supportive and nurturing way.   

Fiddle Camp between classes

So, if playing music with other kids increases empathy, what does this say about family music?  Where do we need empathy more than at home?  Don't we often say the unkindest things to the people we love most?  We're patient with strangers at work and at school, but often there's no patience left for our families.  When we play music together, we listen to each other.  We watch each other and interact.  And it brings us joy.  Sometimes, it doesn't work that way, and someone walks away mad.  But as time goes on, that happens less.  We're learning, and we're learning together as a family.  And if we're increasing our empathy while we're at it, we should all go play some music together.

What we're focused on

This post is about focus, extreme focus.  Although most of us admire this kind of focus, we usually encourage our kids to do things in scheduled increments of no more than an hour.  That's the very best part of homeschooling.  Allowing the kids to work on what they're interested in for as long as they want.

Gus is involved with an amazing project with an awesome bunch of talented musicians.  He's working on it all the time and loving it.  He's practicing the songs for hours a day.  When he's not doing that he's poring through the Mountain Minstrelsy book, picking out more songs, or strumming his banjo, chord chart in hand writing more songs.  Its what he's humming as he plays Legos, and what he's talking about after I tuck him in and turn out the light at bedtime.



This is what Gus's life looks like right now. 

 Helping to make sure that the mikes and recording equipment are set up correctly.

Learning how the sound board works.

Making SPACE ECHOs.

 Practicing with the band.

 Composing more Mountain Minstrelsy.

Writing about science.

Making art.

 And, as always, taking pictures of the cat.

Poor Little Soldier's Boy

Mountain Mistrelsy, a book by Henry Shoemaker, arrived in the mail.  We sat down on the porch to read it.  It is a collection of songs from the turn of the century, the previous one not the recent one, collected from the porches, campfires, hunting and lumber camps of Northern Pennsylvania.

You can't open the book and sing the songs.  The tunes were lost, only the words remain.  Soundless songs of loss and despair, of love and death, cries for social change.

A group of local musicians are bringing these songs back to life for a recording project called Mountain Mistrelsy.  Gus has been asked to play fiddle for the project.

We flipped through the book, reading a page where the title grabbed our attention.

Gus was immediately drawn to A Soldier's Poor Little Boy, the story of the orphan of a soldier freezing in a snowstorm and begging an old lady to let him into the warm.  I read the story, but it didn't sing to me.  I only saw words on the page.

He ran to his banjo and asked me to read the first line.  He plunked around and found some chords.  We wrote them down.  I read the next line and the banjo replied with more chords, until we reached the end of the first verse.   He played through it until he was satisfied.

He had reached through the pages of the book and the chords on his banjo drew the outline of that orphan from long ago, freezing in the snow.  

 I played through the chords for him and he listened quietly, then began to play fiddle, first long notes like blowing wind, and then a simple melody that descended with the boy's dispair, and rose with his hope, repeating over and over between the verses.  The notes of the fiddle sketched in the features of the hungry child and the woman who saved him.

We played the song together as a family over and over again, adjusting words and changing the key to accommodate our voices.  It became real to us, a spare haunting melody, like a black and white photo of the boy saved from the storm.

Gus played it for the rest of the Mountain Minstrels.  They played it together on guitar, banjo, bass, drums, mandolin, changing the phrasing and the tempo, round and round until a complete song emerged.  The boy's story, like the boy in the song, had been rescued from the whiteout of time and obscurity.  A complete picture emerged of a lonely woman who had lost her son in the war and the rescued boy, playing and singing their song by the fireplace as the storm receded into the background outside.

 

photo by Tim Yarrington

Wordless Wednesday - Fossil Hunting