Laura Risk, is ready to come to our next Zoom meeting. Don’t miss this one!
NW Scottish Fiddlers will host the incredible Laura Risk at 1 PM on Sunday, May 16th. It will be a free workshop, and will be recorded on Zoom. Sheet music, along with recordings of the tunes, will be distributed after the workshop.
If you don’t know Laura, The Boston Globe describes her as a virtuoso fiddler, and that her fluency in fiddle styes is remarkable. Filmmaker Ken Burns described her fiddling as “a revelation and achingly beautiful”, and Living Tradition hails her “powerful, percussive style… bursting with energy and passion”. See Laura play Neil Gow’s Lament, on Youtube here.
Originally from California, now living in Montreal, Laura performs and teaches Scottish and Québécois fiddling internationally and has over a dozen albums to her credit. Her distinctive sound and compelling interpretations of traditional tunes are intensely personal yet grounded in meticulous archival and ethnographic research. She’s also been an instructor at Valley of the Moon for many years. She has a PhD in Musicology from McGill University.
Laura is an Assistant Professor of Music and Culture in the Department of Arts, Culture and Media at the University of Toronto Scarborough, with a cross appointment in the Graduate Department of the Faculty of Music at the University of Toronto.
She collaborated with renowned Scottish Highland fiddler Aonghas Grant, fiddler Barbara McOwen and ethnomusicologist, Peggy Duesenberry on the Glengarry Collection: The Highland Fiddle Music of Aonghas Grant. The collection focuses on the core of Aonghas’ music: Highland fiddling, and its connections to pipe tunes and Gaelic songs.
For more information on Laura’s accomplishments in performance, or in academia, see her website. You’ll also see a wide variety of CD’s, books, and more that Laura has worked on through the years, and now currently for sale.
As always, we offer these workshops as a way to support musicians such as Laura, who have lost work due to Covid. We will have a tip jar for those folks who wish to show their appreciation to Laura. The Zoom link for the workshop will be sent by email on May 15th-just two weeks away!
If you have questions, please write to Marcia Thumma.
