BRATTLEBORO — Now in its ninth year, the Southeastern Vermont's Northern Roots Traditional Music Festival brings together local and regional musicians representing the best of various northern musical traditions.
This year's festival features more than 20 musicians and the rich traditions of Ireland, Scotland, England, Scandinavia, New England, and French Canada.
On Saturday, Jan. 30, the Northern Roots Festival begins with a full slate of daytime participation and performance activities, including workshops, panels, mini-concerts, pub sessions, and a dance band workshop that leads to playing for a family dance.
The festival concludes with an evening performance featuring musicians representing the best of the northern musical traditions.
Keith Murphy, director of the music festival, has been running the event since its inception when he and his wife Becky Tracy initiated a program of traditional music at the Brattleboro Music Center (BMC) almost a decade ago.
An accomplished composer and arranger in the realm of traditional music, who has also composed for theater and film, Murphy is a featured performer on well over a dozen recordings and a guest musician on numerous others.
Although Murphy and Tracy had been touring together playing traditional music for 25 years, there came a time when the couple both wanted a change and hoped to become more involved with the community in southern Vermont.
“Although we hoped to teach, we did not want merely to give private lessons, but rather desired to interact with the community, creating social music for both children and adults,” says Murphy.
Both he and his wife wanted a program that would be an easy way for someone interested in traditional music to get involved.
What they initiated at BMC includes weekly classes for kids and adults, summer programs, as well as this annual Traditional Music Festival.
“It's funny thinking back how my wife and I joined the BMC staff,” says Murphy. “It involved coincidence and some fortuitous events. I am not claiming that BMC had no association with traditional music before my wife and I joined the faculty, but nothing on the scale we were proposing.
“Luckily, at that time, Richard Riley was briefly on the staff of the school. Although he was a classical musician, we had a mutual friend who played traditional music. He was enthused about the idea of expanding BMC to include traditional music and, with his organizational frame of mind, he helped us get the festival off the ground.”
If presenting non-classical music at BMC was rare at that time, increasingly the school has embraced other kinds of music. “Now you find courses such as vocal classes for Broadway scores or another teaching young kids how to play the ukulele,” says Murphy.
He says the collaboration with BMC has been great, and, with the school's support, the traditional music program has thrived.
While Murphy acknowledges that Brattleboro has been the home for traditional musicians for a long time, these were mostly touring musicians who made their base in southern Vermont.
“Our work with the student community has produced a distinct wave of new players, who after nine years have brought the music to a high level,” he says.
There are relatively few places like BMC promoting traditional music.
“Concord [N.H.] Music School has a similar program, and we often collaborate with them,” says Murphy. “However, in recent years, more colleges are opening up to this music, particularly in the Boston area, with schools like Berklee and the New England Conservatory of Music.”
Murphy initially studied to be a classical musician, but he had a strong personal background that led him toward traditional music.
“My mother was from Scotland, and I spent much of my youth in Newfoundland, which has a strong traditional music culture,” he says.
But what precisely is traditional music? Murphy finds coming up with a definition a daunting challenge.
“There are hundreds or even thousands of forms of traditional music from all over the world,” he says.
However, all of it is essentially dance music.
“That is, it originates in dance forms, although now the music is played outside of dance halls,” explains Murphy. “There is a whole variety of music that all come from dance forms. It is toe-tapping music.”
At BMC, Murphy and Tracy focus on traditional music that primarily is from the Celtic tradition, which includes Irish, Scottish, French-Canadian, and traditional English music.
“We even sometimes, as in the upcoming Northern Roots Festival, include Scandinavian music,” Murphy says.
Scandinavian traditional music has been embraced by celebrated performers of Irish and Celtic music, who incorporate those traditions and songs into their work.
“It may be a recent addition to the scene, but if you go to an area contra dance, I do not think it would be surprising to find one or more Swedish dances as part of the mix,” says Murphy.
The number of performers can vary greatly in traditional music.
“As in other years during the festival, we are hosting an afternoon jam session at McNeill's Brewery, where up to 40 musicians will be playing together,” says Murphy. “But often traditional music is more modest in scale, with very few players performing.”
The festival gives people the chance to hear authentic traditional music in various genres side by side. Murphy believes that the mission of Northern Roots Festival is to present traditional music in such a way that will highlight the style and technique of the original music.
“Nowadays, you can find a fiddler playing with a big band or put into another large ensemble arrangement, which is great, but it's not what we are showcasing here,” says Murphy.
You might say Murphy wants to emphasize the traditional in traditional music.
“We try to discover the essence of this music,” he explains. “I don't want to sound moralistic, but we are committed to presenting the music as intimately as possible, as aesthetically true as we can, and as pure as you will find it.”
The festival has come a long way in the past decade.
“Originally it was quite small,” says Murphy. “We had less than 10 players, now we have over 25. More and more, especially as the proficiency of our musical community has grown, we try to promote local players at the festival. We see Northern Roots as a community event, although always keeping the music at a high level. We also try to encourage local musicians to collaborate with someone new, to pull their music together in a fresh way.”
The programing for Northern Roots attempts to balance three things: presenting, performing, and teaching.
“We present many styles of music and dance,” Murphy says. “In the last few years, there has been the addition of a dance element at Northern Roots and there will be set dance teaching. More than performing happens here. There are a range of workshops.”
Murphy will be playing more this year than he has in others, but he usually like to spend his day just listening to these high-caliber musicians and sitting in on some classes.
“This year I am particularly excited about Mariel Vandersteel, a phenomenal player and teacher of Scandinavian music, who makes hauntingly beautiful music and will be teaching a class,” he says.
The goal of programming events at Northern Roots is to attract many different kinds of people.
“I would put our audiences in categories,” says Murphy. “First, we have musicians who come to play and learn. Then there are those who don't play but love the music. They many be more interested in one thing or another, such as instrumental or singing music, or even traditional-music-based dancing. Finally, we like to present events that are suitable for the whole family, including a dance the afternoon of the festival.”
Murphy says Northern Roots is important because there are so few events like this.
“There used to be the Champlain Valley Festival in Burlington, which we traditional musicians would walk on our hands and knees to attended, but that recently folded,” he says. “There is another festival in Randolph that is beloved by traditional music fans. But there is not a lot more than that around here.”
Yet, Northern Roots keeps growing.
“We do attract a big crowd and we often sell out the New England Youth Theatre, where we have performed for many years,” says Murphy. “There was some thought about shifting to a big venue, but we are hesitant to move. We like the ambiance of NEYT, and its intimate space allows us not to have to use amplification at most of our events.”