MARLBORO-After a successful first year at the arts-friendly Marlboro campus, the Boston States Fiddle Camp (BSFC) returns to Potash Hill Wednesday through Sunday, Oct. 23 to 27, for a four-day camp culminating in a staff concert.
It is called the Boston States Fiddle Camp because, as told on bostonstatesfiddle.com, "'The Boston States' is the nickname Cape Bretoners have for New England, where [immigrants] came to live and work in droves in the late 19th/early 20th century (predominantly in the greater Boston area).
"Like their Scottish ancestors who settled in Nova Scotia over a century before, they brought their music, language, and dance with them and preserved that cultural heritage here in New England."
Artistic Director Katie McNally says she has "played Scottish and Cape Breton music since I was a kid." Born in New Hampshire, she grew up outside Boston where there is still, "an amazing pipeline from Cape Breton to Boston in this realm of music [...] so Boston is one of the few places where there's a thriving fiddle music tradition."
Thanks, to a great extent, to the Canadian-American Club in Watertown, Massachusetts; the Boston Scottish Fiddle Club; and the Boston-area branch of the Royal Scottish Country Dance Society, the region has "long been a hotbed for Scottish music and culture in America," the website adds. "At Boston States Fiddle Camp, we strive to maintain and grow that legacy."
"Fiddle music isn't taught at conservatory," McNally says, so she, a highly regarded, widely heard, and amply recorded fiddler, learned elsewhere - namely, the Boston Harbor Scottish Fiddle School, "which was very important to me growing up," she said.
When that school folded in 2019, a group of musicians wanted to create another training opportunity in New England - one "that would bring in world class musicians from Scotland and Cape Breton and make a special location for it," she says.
Thus, the BSFC was founded in 2020 to offer musical immersion into Scottish and Cape Breton traditional music for some 120 musicians from a broad geographic reach - "from all over New England primarily," says McNally.
Word of mouth creates a connection
This year, "a couple students are taking [Amtrak's] Vermonter from D.C. and Philly, and we have one guy coming all the way from Thailand, so we have kind of a wide spread of folks," she adds.
Though primarily a residential program, the BSFC is offering spots for local day campers for the first time this year.
"We had a spot [to host the camp] before Potash Hill, but we lost it," says McNally, calling 2023, the camp's first season on the campus, "a dark night of the soul."
"I was thinking, 'This isn't going to happen; we don't have a space for it,'" she says. "We were searching all over New England for a spot."
Then Nancy Bell, a friend of McNally's who was a cook at that first camp, met Brian Mooney, a graduate and writing instructor at the now-defunct Marlboro College, who is also the managing director of Potash Hill.
Mooney is the creator of the Storymatic Studios, which publishes a line of creative writing prompts and games and is headquartered in the Cotton Mill Industrial Park in Brattleboro. Bell also operates as a seamstress in the former mill building.
So Bell connected McNally with Mooney, and "it was kismet," McNally says.
"Potash Hill is built for music," she observes. "All they want to do is support the arts and make space for community, so I feel so lucky that the meeting happened."
World-class performers will instruct
Offering classes in fiddle, piano, guitar, Gaelic song, Cape Breton step dancing, and bagpipes, the camp's purpose "is to provide the world's best instruction in Scottish music, all while building our local community and fostering creativity and fun across ability levels, age, and backgrounds," its website says.
Following the four-day stretch of concentrated engagement with Scottish music, the Sunday staff concert will feature, according to McNally, "a long list of world-class performers."
Those musicians include Andrea Beaton, Louise Bichan, Galen Fraser, Leland Martin, Sarah Collins [and McNally herself] on fiddle; Dominique Dodge on harp and singing in Gaelic; step dancer Abbie MacQuarrie; Keith Murphy [of Brattleboro] and Eamon Sefton on guitar; Neil Pearlman on piano; Tim Cummings on bagpipes; and Scottish Fish, a Boston-based fiddle band.
"It will be a lot of fun with dance music - jigs and reels, beautiful Gaelic singing, step dancing, a little bit of everything," McNally adds.
Creativity and culture on Potash Hill
Mooney says that "Boston States Fiddle Camp aligns with our mission to support creative and cultural programs on campus. For decades, people have come to Potash Hill for inspiration, collaboration, and community."
Boston States Fiddle Camp will "continue this important work, and we look forward to hearing the buildings and grounds fill with Scottish and Cape Breton music," he says.
McNally speaks of her love of the genre.
"There's something really rugged and fierce about this fiddle style, in particular," she says.
"I grew up playing for contra dances locally, but this music really has my heart in a different way," McNally says.
She calls the music "very dramatic" - a quality that she believes might have caught her attention as a young musician.
"The drama of it, the harmonies - it's indescribable," McNally says.
Information on the spots available for local day campers and on the Sunday, Oct. 27, concert at 1:30 p.m. at Potash Hill Dining Hall, ($25 in advance, $30 at the door) is at bostonstatesfiddle.com.
This Arts item by Annie Landenberger was written for The Commons.