Stewart Hardy

The Morpeth Northumbrian Gathering is celebrating its big 50th Anniversary this year and there is lots planned. On the Friday night there will be the Golden Gala Concert in the Methodist Church, in which I will be playing with Bottle Band Band, Tyneside Fiddle Alliance and leading the Morpeth Community Strings group in their debut performance. On the Saturday there will be the usual competitions, and I will be supporting family and friends in the fiddle classes, and might even be persuaded to enter the instrumental duos! The Tyneside Fiddle Alliance plan to defend their title in the Concert Band category and there will be many other great things going on. Do come along and support this wonderful celebration of Northumbrian traditional music, song and dance.

“An exciting three-day annual festival of street entertainment, indoor events, music, dance, craft, dialect, heritage and traditional fun – held the weekend after Easter in the medieval market town of Morpeth, 14 miles north of Newcastle upon Tyne.

The festival is a true gathering of people who come together to enjoy the traditional culture of Northumberland and the wider NE region. It features concerts, dance, crafts, battle re-enactments, dialect, stories, drama, workshops, sessions, singarounds, competitions, stalls, bellringing, orienteering, tours, walks, talks and street performances which include a young people’s pageant as part of the Saturday morning Border Cavalcade.”

Advanced Fiddle Technique

27th – 29th September 2019
Rydal Hall, Ambleside LA22 9LX

Join Stewart in the beautiful surroundings of Rydal Hall in the Lake District, for a weekend of intensive fiddle tuition. This course is aimed at proficient players with good to high technical competence, who are comfortable with their instruments and their repertoire and who may have some of the following experience and skills:

• – Playing folk tunes at dance tempo
• – Comfortable in key signatures of up to 3 sharps and 1 flat
• – Familiarity with key signatures of up to 4 sharps and 3 flats
• – Attending folk music sessions and joining in with the tunes
• – Leading sets of tunes in sessions
• – Playing in ceilidh and/or concert bands
• – Teaching violin and/or fiddle

The workshop will typically take between 8 and 12 people from Friday evening until Sunday afternoon. All tuition, resources, accommodation, food and daytime refreshments are included. Sheet music and mp3 files of the tunes covered are sent out in advance, and recordings of exercises from the course are sent on to you afterwards.

These courses are centred around the technical issues that come with playing fiddle music, with as much emphasis on the how as there is on the what. Focusing on left-hand and bowing technique, with stylistic interpretation of the music a key feature, these workshops delve deep into the tunes, extracting exercises to improve technique and allow its application to a wider repertoire. Tunes are carefully selected for their technical or stylistic content whilst also baring in mind practical considerations such as their usefulness in folk music sessions or as dance repertoire. The tunes are taught ‘as if by ear’, meaning they are taught phrase by phrase at a tempo and with sufficient repetition to enable learning without recourse to reading notation, but with notation available at any point should that be desired or necessary. This encourages the development of aural pattern recognition and general musicality, enhancing musicianship and the enjoyment of playing music in social settings.

Places on Advanced Fiddle Techniques courses are available on application. For further information or to express your interest in this course, please email Ali (jsarts@stewarthardy.co.uk)