Trivia that matter
I’ve posted the best of my Winfield pictures at my Flickr site. The photo above is of the old-time band that supplied music for Saturday evening’s contra dance. Roger, the fiddler on the left tapping his foot double-time, took home yet another violin in the old-time fiddle competition earlier that evening. ((You can listen to his performances here.)) Here’s the band late in the dance:
Here’s a panorama from early in the dance.
Update: Here’s a complete dance:
Winfield was good, and it’s going to take me another day or two to fully recover. I was hoping to get to bed early tonight, but the people who run the hair salon across the alley decided to throw a street party, complete with an obnoxious funky band. Bleah.
I hope to have the pictures and recordings edited later this week. Until then, here’s Shohei Toyoda, who placed third in the fingerpicking competition this year.
Just a few music videos that caught my ear recently.
Tim and Myles Thompson will be at Winfield this year.
Probably as painless an introduction to twelve-tone music as you’ll ever find. I’m less enthused by the philosophy, though — Josh calls it “rank nominalism.”
I experimented with some highly-simplified twelve tone techniques some years back. The results were not pretty. For the morbidly curious, “Twelve Toes” was probably the least unsuccessful.
… maybe.
This is a slide show of the pictures I took at the Walnut Valley Festival. You might notice a lot of photos of Roger and Tricia. That’s partly because you were likely to hear good music when they were around. They are whom you hear in the video.
Roger Netherton, a young friend of mine, placed second this year in the old-time fiddle contest at Winfield Friday. He celebrated by heading over to Carp Camp, where he led the assembled eccentrics in a couple of tunes. Here’s the first. It starts off with Roger alone.
There are more pictures of carp people below the fold.
The gizmo in yesterday’s post is a Stroh violin. This is what it sounds like:
The fiddler is Jill Woodhouse, of the Beautiful Music Violin Shop in Lawrence, Kansas.
It will probably take me several days to go through all my Winfield pictures and recordings. Until then, here’s a minor project for you: identify this object:
When the international market for anime collapses, Japan can export fingerpickers. Akihiro Tanaka took second place in the International Fingerstyle Championship at the Walnut Valley Festival two years ago, first place last year, and was a featured performer this year. Meanwhile, Tomoake Kawabata placed second in this year’s contest Thursday.
I wasn’t able to go to Winfield this year, so I only just now discovered that the winner of the International Fingerstyle Guitar Championship last Thursday evening was Akihiro Tanaka of Kyoto. He took second place last year, and I caught his main stage performance then.
Update: The international language II
Old-time music has its followers in Japan. Some friends of mine recently discovered one of their videos on this bulletin board. (See item #104.)
Bishop-elect James Conley. (Photo by Chris Riggs.)
If you want to identify the priests in a diocese most likely to be named bishops, see which ones attend bluegrass festivals. In years past, when I went to Winfield, I would find Fathers Paul Coakley and James Conley there, too. Coakley is now the bishop of the Salina, Kansas, diocese, and Conley has just been named auxiliary bishop of Denver.
