December 4, 2002

Musicians fiddle around

Family String Band Studio workshop features Seattle fiddle champion
By Carol South
Herald contributing writer
       Resin up your bow and learn to fiddle a lively, toe-tappin' tune.
      Twenty fiddle players of all ages and experience levels gathered Wednesday evening at the Family String Band Studio for a three-hour fiddle workshop.
      Stuart Williams, a fiddle champion from Seattle, conducted the seminar, leading students through the basics of fiddling and demonstrating his craft, transferring his knowledge by osmosis. Williams is the brother of studio owner, Chris Williams, who also teaches fiddle and classical violin.
      Stuart Williams noted that the fiddle is a folk instrument learned more by repetition and creativity than by technical prowess.
      "I'll teach you how to make songs sound so other people want to wiggle around when they hear them," Williams told his students as he worked them step by step through an old Ozark tune called "Little Rabbit, Where's Your Mama?"
      "The important thing is using the bow - ask a fiddler what a bow is and they'll tell you it's a drumstick for a long skinny drum."
      Curiosity about the fiddle brought Cathy Haskin of Acme, a classical violinist for ten years, to the workshop. Haskin teaches private lessons and is a mentor with the Traverse Area Youth Orchestras. The fiddle had intrigued her for a few years, prompted by her father's interest and her hope that she could teach him the instrument someday.
      Well versed in the nuances, music and techniques of classical violin, Haskin enjoyed playing in the more informal, rollicking style of the fiddle. During the evening she had to break some sacrosanct rules of classical violin: posture, finger positioning and bowing style.
      "The fiddle has some techniques in both the bowing and the fingering that I had not tried before," Haskin said.
      Williams emphasized that with fiddle players, especially old time players who are largely self-taught, being comfortable playing is more important that what it looks like. It is a much more intuitive instrument, meant to create a dancing good time for listeners.
      Haskin said this attitude was both challenging and freeing to someone steeped in the classical violin style.
      "Classical music has lots of rules that must be observed and you are trying to reproduce what the composer was feeling when he wrote the music," she said. "In fiddle, you take a basic tune and add to it, making it truly your own creation."
      "It was so fun to hear everyone play the song differently at their own level of ability and yet, we all sounded so good together," she noted.
      Empire resident Mary Sharry has been playing the fiddle for a few years, finding it easier to play than the classical violin. She takes weekly lessons in the fiddle and declares it a fun instrument to play.
      "The workshop was a wonderful experience," Sharry said. "Fiddling is a feeling and listening is probably the most important thing you can do. Just be around it and absorb as much as you can."
      Williams learned much of his fiddling from listening to and playing with some old fiddle masters. Growing up in a musical family, where his father, Glen, played violin in symphonies in Battle Creek, Kalamazoo and Traverse City, Williams played trumpet, recorder, piano and percussion. He picked up the fiddle while in college in Ann Arbor and fell in love, avidly working to master the sound and style.
      "The way I learned these tunes, there were not too many books or records or teachers then," he recalled. "But there was an older generation of fiddlers who played at square dances in the 20s and 30s."
      Chris Williams was thrilled to include a workshop as part of her brother's vacation schedule. She was pleased by the interest from both her fiddle and violin students, as well as from the community. Williams said she hopes to provide additional workshops in the future. This is part of keeping this folk instrument, whose roots stretch into the founding days of America, alive.
      "There's very, very few threads, people who've been able to carry the knowledge through," she said. "For the most part, the knowledge has skipped a generation. Those of us who are now playing have had to reach back and sometimes kind of guess."
      "There are places where people have learned it from their fathers and their fathers learned it from their fathers or mothers and those people are treasures."