>> Steve Winick: Welcome to the 2024
Homegrown Concert Series here at the American Folk Life Center of
the Library of Congress. My name is Steve Winick, and
for many years we've presented the Homegrown Concert series
here, bringing the best of traditional folk music and
dance to the Library of Congress. And today, we're very
pleased to have the duo Rakish with us. They play traditional
Celtic music, Irish and Scottish music, what we often call
Celtic music, and they explored the connections of that music
to baroque and galant styles. And we'll talk a little bit
about that in the interview. We're also delighted that they
used some field recordings from our archive, as well as
material from the library's music division in their
concert, and we're delighted that we had this concert here
in the Whittall Pavilion among the Guarneris and Stradivaris
and Amatis that we have displayed here, because that's
sort of part of the ambience of your music. So welcome to the
members of Rakish - Maura Shawn Scanlin and Conor Hearn. Thank you for joining us today
for this interview. >> Conor Hearn: Thanks for having us. It's a
real pleasure to be here. >> Steve Winick: Well, let's begin by
asking you a little bit just about your individual musical background. So I guess we can start with
Maura, and you can tell us a little bit about how you got
started in music. >> Maura Scanlin: Sure. Well, I
started, fiddle lessons. Violin lessons. When I was
three. My parents got me into the
Suzuki method. I started on a cardboard
box taped to a ruler. Classic trick. And then. Yeah, I was lucky to grow up
with a few really close friends who who also were learning the
violin in the Suzuki method, kind of with me, along with me. And we just sort of, you know,
were continually inspiring one another, I think, to, to keep
playing music. And, yeah, that's kind of
how I got into music, I'd say. >> Steve Winick: All right. And Conor,
what about you? >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, I grew up in a
fairly musical family. I have older siblings who
also play fiddle music. My sister plays the fiddle and
my brother plays the cello. So we grew up kind of
surrounded by fiddle music. And the, the Washington,
D.C. area, the Baltimore, Maryland
Irish music community. And, yeah, hearing a lot of a
lot of records growing up, listening to a lot of a lot of
music, a lot of tunes specifically, and I
actually grew up playing the fiddle primarily. It was my first instrument, and
I was, never quite very good at it. And at some point I
started playing the guitar, you know, as a teenager in middle
school, sort of in that culture of middle schoolers like
learning licks and teaching each other licks and that thing. But, at some point it
became really valuable to have the background of playing
fiddle and having learned all these tunes on the fiddle and
then applying that repertoire to the type of guitar playing that
I was doing because, I found out that I just, I knew all of
these tunes. And as a guitar player, it's
not necessarily the role of the guitar in traditional Irish
music and Scottish music to play the melody, but it was very
valuable to me to to know all the melodies, to lend that
accompaniment better to the to the music that I was playing a
lot of at the time and just had like a lot of peers and
colleagues, as I say, colleagues that were kids. But like, you
know, right, you know, a lot of friends who were playing fiddle
in my neighborhood and in my community and stuff. So it's
just a very social kind of music education. Yeah. >> Steve Winick: And I think, Maura
you then went to more formal music education. So talk about your,
your, you know, development in that area. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. Well, yeah, from the Suzuki. I kind of kept down the
classical music path. And I was playing fiddle
Celtic music specifically all along as well. But, I got
pretty serious about classical music, and it led me to. I went to the North Carolina
School of the Arts for high school, which was a really
great kind of early immersion in, music study. And from there I went to the
New England Conservatory to do my undergraduate degree. And then I got to go to Yale
for my master's in violin performance as well. >> Steve Winick: All right. And Conor,
you also play other kinds of music besides Irish music. So talk a little bit about your
your other musics too. >> Conor Hearn: Yeah. I guess I had a lot
of lucky, communities to be a part of as a kid. And I was in school, I
was doing some violin playing an orchestra and stuff. Never on a really serious
level, but just had that background and, I was
playing a lot of jazz with, my, my peers who were, you
know, high school jazz band age, folks just, like, learning
bebop tunes and swing tunes and stuff. And it wasn't such
that, like, that was really what I was trying to do with the
guitar, but just in the sense. Is that, jazz and and
things like bluegrass is kind of where a lot of guitar education
is at thing. Things like the university
level. Right. So like it's harder to
find a, like an Irish guitar teacher or something like that
at a lot of liberal arts colleges and stuff, but you can
probably take jazz lessons and you can learn Django tunes and,
you know, learn straight ahead stuff. That's just really
good overall education for learning the fretboard and,
you know, working on things like your sense of time and, all
these, all these technical and kind of musical backgrounds
that, even if it's not necessarily what we're doing on
stage, it's like useful to, to be in that context where,
you know, the stuff that like you would have learned at NEC
or whatever, just like, even if it's not, you're playing
classical music primarily, you're you're learning your,
your swing tunes and your, music theory kind of
foundational stuff. So I just had a lot of those
different, practices growing up. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. I mean, in a
sense, it's sort of the ideal for an Irish music accompanist on guitar to
have both a sense of the tunes from playing fiddle and a sense
of chord voicings and all kinds of ways of making, you know,
the guitar work that you get in jazz. >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, you can't do it
without knowing the repertoire. But yeah, there are a lot of
things you need to know about just opening up the instrument
to make it accessible in a lot of different contexts. That is
useful. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. Very cool. So, Maura, you
also are a two time North American Scottish fiddle
champion, I believe. Is that true? >> Maura Scanlin: That is true, yes. >> Steve Winick: So talk about the
little competition scene a bit because that, you know, affects
traditional Irish and Scottish music quite a bit. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. Well the,
the Scottish, the US National Scottish Fiddling Championship,
it kind of it's a type of competition that is kind of
specifically focused in on a few types of tunes. So all the competitors are
playing. They have to everybody has to
play a slow air, a strathspey, which is a very
quintessentially Scottish type of tune that you don't really
find anywhere else. A march. You play the March 1st, then
the strathspey, then a reel at the end of that, and it's just
kind of a way to demonstrate, skills across, across a
wide variety of, of tune types. And, it's a way to kind of
demonstrate your technical range as well, because across all
four of those tunes, you have to quite a lot of different things
that you have to remember. Yeah. But yeah, it's, it's
a, it's a very nice community of, of musicians and really
dedicated to keeping the kind of golden era of Scottish fiddle
music, preserved and alive. >> Steve Winick: Very cool. So this is
sort of what you bring to the duo each individually, but let's talk
about the duo itself and how it works to have all these
individual types of backgrounds and then try to, you know, meld
them together into the music that you do as Rakish. >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, absolutely. Well, I mean, I suppose we
we've been playing together for a long time. So there's this
sense that, there's just a lot of familiarity, which even
though we both have pretty different backgrounds, there's
a lot of common ground. And then there's also like some
different backgrounds. A primary touchstone for me
is just like how well we know the other person musically. Right? So. Even even though there are
these areas of expertise that Maura has that I don't like, I,
I know what her areas of expertise are. So there's this
kind of that kind of trust, about each other's strengths
and everything. And I suppose it was like 8
or 9 years ago that we met. So, this, this background
that we have of, playing intimate music, like in, in
stripped down duo settings, right? Fiddle guitar. It's not as much of a. Of a big sound, as you would
get with something like a ceilidh band or something like
an ensemble that some of the other ensembles that we were
playing in around the time. So that was sort of a a jumping
off point for me. I don't know, like, just
thinking about what you can do with two voices or the, the
kind of stripped down version of an ensemble. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. I would say
our different kind of influences from chamber music or
improvisational music, such as jazz or, you know, more
contemporary acoustic music. They kind of all wind their
way into the music that we create. And, yeah, I think
initially we really enjoyed particularly playing together,
because we had a lot of shared, like very
particular shared love of like, oh, this one fiddle player,
like, you know, we just love this playing. And we wanted to
kind of emulate that style. And then and then through that,
I think we kind of found a little bit of our own sound,
through trying to kind of bring elements of, of those,
like our favorite fiddle players style into something that maybe
had a little bit more arrangement or through
composition. So, so in a way, our all those
different kind of influences blended together and created a
sound that I think we're still trying to find, you know, but,
but we've had a lot of fun trying to figure out how to
kind of bring the elements of traditional music with the
elements of more composed music from, say, the classical music
or Baroque tradition, and also elements of improvisation. So we're kind of at the same
time, we're trying to kind of write music when we write music
or perform, that allows for a little bit of like very
specific arrangement that might not be present in just, you
know, if we were just playing the tunes three times through. Yeah. And then also kind of
cracking the tunes open at certain points and allowing for
a little bit more of like, improvisational moments. So those are the things that I
think we really love to do and try to bring a little special
sauce to what we're doing. >> Conor Hearn: And it sort of creates
this space where, there's arrangement and there's
composition and they sort of blur together a little bit. Whereas Maura was saying with,
especially with traditional Irish music, for example, you'd
have a set of tunes where this is the tune and it's important
that the tune gets played the way the tune goes, and you do
it three times and you go to the next tune. And for us, in
the process of composition, if it's an original tune,
something that Maura wrote or something that I wrote and
you're kind of arranging that, then you might have this moment
where you say, well, at this point in the arrangement, like,
we actually want to hear that note or, or have that beat
there. And since you composed it, you
can get rid of it and say, and that's serving the purpose of
the arrangement. So there's this sort of sense
that, stuff is getting revised and, edited
throughout the compositional process and arrangement process
and they sort of blend into one another. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. And I think one
thing that occurs to me is that in small groups like duos in the Irish
and Scottish sort of music world, I think the guitar does
get more, more ability to, to play more, more improvisation
as possible, just because you don't have other things in the,
you know, in that space. Do you find that that that's
true playing in a duo? >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, totally. I've
played in a lot of ensemble settings and my brother's a cellist. So growing
up I played with my sister who was playing the fiddle, and my
brother who was playing the cello, and that was kind of a
formative, ensemble practice for me. And one of the things
about that particular setting is that the guitar has low notes,
and the cello also has low notes. So you're sort of
constantly like litigating, like, okay, well, who's going
to play that note? Or are we playing the same
note? And if not, is there some sort
of theory to that baseline that we're creating? If we're doing
something different or does it kind of managing that space? And since we were siblings, we
kind of got it to a point where we could mostly do it in the
sort of Vulcan mind meld kind of way, just like assume that he's
going to do that and follow that way. But anyway, all of which
is to say, there's playing with the bass player and playing
with another accompanist and sort of, getting to
understand somebody else's harmonic and rhythmic and
chordal instincts. And then there's the sort
of open plane of doing all of that, more or less by yourself
when you're accompanying somebody who is primarily the
melody player in that setting, which is, you know, the sort of
double edged sword of freedom. And, the flip side
of that where you can do anything you want, and you also
have to make sure that it doesn't sound like you're just
doing whatever. So sure. >> Maura Scanlin: Whatever you do is
going to be heard, right? >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. So you have to I think
for me, part of that process is, Creating a sense of
development. Right. So we're hearing the
tune and we're outlining what the tune wants, especially in a
traditional context of I'm playing with folks who are
really steeped in, playing traditional music, where we're
serving what the melody is saying. Right. But also
maybe the third time we're playing it, it doesn't sound
identical to the first time we played it. So for me, that's
kind of a general guiding principle of thinking about how
to develop and support something in a melody. So that it's not just
playing like, here are the chords and this is the harmony,
right? Because there's no there's no
official set of chords or harmony for the tune. They're
all kind of traditionally unaccompanied. So, kind of
listening to that melody deeply and taking it seriously. But then also once you know it,
you can develop it and expand on it and that in that direction. So that's kind of the the meat
and potatoes approach for, for approaching the guitar and
a fiddle in the duo setting for me, you know. >> Steve Winick: Cool. Do you have
anything to add to that, Maura? Any observations there? >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. Well, I. I think playing in a duo is a
really kind of a particular thing that it's. It's been a big learning
process all these years for me, for sure. And it in a sense, it
kind of feels like. There's not really this idea of
like, melody and accompaniment so much when when you're in a
duo or when you're in our duo, when hopefully in our duo. I should say. I think it is
present in certain scenarios for sure. But, the way that we
like to think about the music that we play is, is very much
kind of. You couldn't like. Both are just. Absolutely necessary, like
having the harmony and having the melody. And, you know,
we're not always in the same role. Like, I'm not always the
one playing the melody. Or sometimes I switch into a
more accompanimental role and allow Conor to kind of,
rise to the foreground, whatever, whatever is happening
over there in Guitar Land, which is always incredible, and groovy. But yeah, I think it's a
really cool kind of space because it does, in a way feel
like we're two soloists, but at the same time, like, each
of what we're bringing is hopefully complementing the
other. And in a way that kind of
equals, more of the sum of its parts or whatever that
saying is. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, yeah. I noticed in the concert there
was at least one place where you, you know, put your pick
down and you finger picked the melody at the beginning of the
fairy tune. And you were essentially
accompanying with, you know, with drones and double stops
there. So, yeah. Really, cool
sound and something that you don't hear as much in the
fiddle guitar duo genre. >> Conor Hearn: Right? There's this
huge tradition of guitar players, using the fingerstyle approach
to the guitar to to play melodies on the instrument as
soloists and sort of, or using the guitar in multiple
roles simultaneously. Right, like playing the melody
and accompanying themselves this whole, like, fingerstyle guitar
tradition. And that's really robust in
Celtic music. So it's it's in there and it's
not quite as much my forte or what I'm bringing primarily to
the duo, but, the sense that guitar can be a melody
instrument or a or a contrapuntal instrument or
something, rather than just the boom chuck instrument
or whatever. Right. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. Very nice. So that was that was a great
moment in the concert. But there are many such
moments. And let's, let's talk a bit
about the, the concert itself and the work that you guys did
to to set that up. So the idea of the concert,
I guess, was, just looking at the connections between
traditional music and, what is sometimes called art music
or the classical music of the era, Baroque and, and galant
styles. So talk a little bit about why
that seemed like the thing to do for this, for this concert. >> Maura Scanlin: Well, when I was. In school, I, I was exposed to
baroque music, I guess, sort of for the first time. And, I, I really liked sort
of the, the. Of course, this is a very broad
stroke statement. It's not always like this, but
I was exposed to some particular tunes that I felt like were
very reminiscent of actually traditional Celtic music, just
mostly with the way that they're structured. And a lot of times
certainly the ones that we played today. The dance tunes
are in a binary form where you have an A part and you have a B
part, and both parts repeat. So in that sense, just very
kind of right there on the surface level, there's like
this connection of of just sort of shorter lengths of, of music
that get repeated in a way that doesn't happen in later
classical music where you have much longer form pieces. So I kind of had this idea. I was like, Conor, let's play
this. Well, we got started in this little kind of exercise
because we learned this current from a French Baroque composer,
and that I had actually heard in school in a class in school. And I really liked the piece. And I was like, well, let's
play this. And it's, it's in, you know,
it's in six. And then we can go into a jig
after that. And it just kind of it kind of
opened up this whole project world kind of. And then it was
really fun for us to get to do some more of that type of work. >> Steve Winick: Cool. Yeah. I think. Sorry. Did you have a no. Go ahead. I
just wanted to say, I think it's somewhat underappreciated, the
amount of connection that there always was between traditional
music and, you know, the professional middle class
classical musicians, both that influence going in both
directions with, you know, in Irish music, the obvious
Turlough O'carolan or even earlier. But always you had
this interplay. You always had polkas being
played first in middle class, you know, areas and then
coming down to traditional music. So, yeah. So it's a great, way of
highlighting those connections, I think is, you know, what you
were able to find, but you also talked in the concert a little
bit about some specific things that those, that the
baroque style and galant style and traditional music had in
common. One thing being accompanying
dance. So talk a little about the
dance tradition and why that how that affects the music, you
think? >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. Well, there was just a lot of
social dance back then and, you know, spanning hundreds of
years. And there was the social dance
that happened in the rural halls in, in like rural social halls
in Ireland and Scotland and England. And then there was the
dance that happened in more like aristocratic court courtly
settings. And those courtly settings
were the ones where you would hear, you know, music by
Corelli or whoever. And yeah, then the Irish
dancing tradition, actually, I think it came from the mouth
music, like long time ago. And, and certainly in the 1600s. Yeah. Like you mentioned,
Turlough O'carolan. It was kind of an
interesting timeline for us because they we can't we
couldn't really say that that like this. There was an Irish
fiddle player, and and Henry Purcell must have heard the
Irish fiddle player because we don't really know if that
happened. So, it was kind of, interesting. So we just were focused in on
the, the, the way that just dance music and social dance
was such a big part of the culture in, in whatever class. Right. Whatever region. >> Conor Hearn: Yeah. And just like the, the sense that,
these dances and these social groups that are doing
these dances are still around and like communities that we
grew up in, you know, going to play for a contra dance or
playing at a fiddle festival or camp where there will be
someone's doing the Virginia Reel. And we had this moment. We were looking at the
transcript for the Courant that we played, that was in the
Playford collection. Right. And, you know, the
language can be kind of rarified and, you know, more. I was talking about the binary
form, and the language can kind of feel, not heady, but
like more, more particular in this way. But yeah, when
you think about the binary form, it's like, play the A, play the
B, do it again, you know, and that's like the context that
it's happening in some of the other spaces. And, yeah. So we were looking at the
Courant and it's like, oh yeah, here are the directions for how
to do this dance. That on the one hand feels more
aristocratic, but the directions look exactly the same as, like
any of the dances that we'd hear someone calling out, like this
fiddle camp that we're working at or. >> Maura Scanlin: Take hands. Take hands around. >> Conor Hearn: Right. Yeah. >> Conor Hearn: You find your couple.
It could be like a square dance manual, right? So just like something
we're quite familiar with, even though it's in this, this
kind of other. Context. Yeah, yeah. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. Very cool. Yeah. And those. So you went
not only to our collections here at the, at the American Folk
Life Center, but to the music division and looked at some of
their, manuscripts and things. So you mentioned
Playford. That was one that I know you, perused. What else did you find over
there at the Music Division? >> Maura Scanlin: Well, we got to see
a really cool. Print printing. What do you call it? A
publication? >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, from various editions of
edition of this Corelli manuscript. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah.
One of which. Was from Italy. Like from a
very, very old. And then we got to see one
from, Germany. Right. >> Conor Hearn: Yeah. I think, you
know, there are so many there. And there's, there's one
from Amsterdam in 1715 and another one from Germany and
this one from Rome in 1700. And yeah, thinking about
like the this edition or like the chronology of these
different editions was kind of a fun part of the the task to
like with the dancing master from Playford, I don't know how
many editions there were, but it was a long list. Yeah. And yeah, just especially
in some of the work that we were doing analyzing the harmony of
these pieces and like looking at the figured bass and the bass
lines, like Moore was saying, there are all these
spots where is this was like an editor who put that that symbol
there, you know. And how does that vary across
editions and looking at these different, printings and
these old printings and how the how the notation expands,
right. Yeah. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. And we haven't really talked
about the Irish, component too much, but with, with those
collections, we really, we kind of dove in and. We just listened. We were just listening to a ton
of tunes and, we kind of landed on those Lomax
recordings because mostly because we just really liked
the music. We liked the fiddle playing of
Mickey Doherty and Aggie White and the Ceilidh Band. And that, that kind of
guided us directly to those. There was tons and tons of
other, recordings, actually, of tunes that are so popular
and so often played that we were just kind of like, okay, well,
I don't know really what what we can actually bring for these
tunes because there's just so many people have already,
have already played them and played them in concert and on
Dancehalls and all. So anyway, we kind of went for
these fiddle players that, I wasn't as familiar with, but
loved the style of and just, kind of went from there. And it was really kind of
fascinating. I actually, have been
meaning to tell you this, but anyhow. Well, I notated the
tunes, all the tunes that we that we learned, which was
really fun process for me. So kind of like transcribing
them just so I wouldn't forget them all on stage. But, it was cool
because some of the tunes, even a few of the tunes that I had
previously known, trying to actually play the tunes in the
way, like the way Aggie White actually played the tune, and
they're very particular, like notes that are different
than the way that I knew the tune prior to learning it. Again, learning it for a new a
new concert. But yeah, yeah. >> Conor Hearn: There were a couple of
examples where it was like, oh yeah this is a tune we're familiar with,
but this is the way Aggie played it. And it was kind of cool to
have that specific lens and, transcription of that lens to. Yeah. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, it's
interesting because a lot of the tunes that we have now are there are
certain, you know, players or certain recordings of them that have
become iconic. And so everyone plays it the
way Michael Coleman played it in 1920. But if you look at what
was going on simultaneously to that and before that, in the
tradition, you find that other people at that time were
playing the tune differently. And yeah, you get someone like
Aggie White, who was outside of that commercial music venue
entirely, right? And that you get different,
different tunes. So how did you find Aggie White
even? >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, I suppose just
really like digging through the Lomax collection. And as Moore said,
we listen to a lot of stuff. I think we went through
everything in O'Neills. But it felt like that and. Yeah, yeah, and we just, I
think, you know, one focus was just to focus on the fiddle,
right? Because there's a lot of other
instruments in that collection and in O'Neill's etc. to listen to, but we're
thinking about focusing on the fiddle and trying to highlight
fiddle players, and it works especially well in our setting. Right. And, and she was
just this player who had a distinct voice and I think, as
I said, was playing some tunes that we were familiar with but
had this unique approach to them. But then also her
participation in the the Ballinakill Ceilidh Band and
playing for Ceilidh Band generally, and the the fact
that that apparatus exists to to play for dances and stuff kind
of felt salient to the project. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah, it's a
bummer. That there wasn't more recording
from earlier years, but - but yeah, we it was great to
explore what we could. >> Steve Winick: Could. Yeah. And you
know, another great thing about Aggie White was just being, as you
said in the concert, a pioneering woman fiddler who,
at a time when it wasn't as common for women to be playing
that instrument, or in traditional music in general,
there were only, you know, there were concertina players and a
couple of other things, but definitely. So, yeah. So that's that's very cool
about Aggie White. And it is true that one of the
advantages of that Lomax collection is that it was kind
of a quantum leap in terms of recording, quality over
what had been in the 40s, you know, the 30s and 40s. So you get those early 50s
recordings and all of a sudden it's like, you know, hi fi, as
they said, you. >> Conor Hearn: Can hear the
difference. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. >> Maura Scanlin: Totally. Yeah,
yeah. May or may not have played into
our decision. If I'm going. To listen to this a hundred
times. >> Steve Winick: Right, right. That's definitely part of it. I
want to like it. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, yeah. So, one of the things that
you mentioned reminded me of something that that Conor said
in the, in the concert that that also is kind of, a
connection between the Baroque style and the and traditional
music now, which is times of you said, it was like a time of
rethinking harmony in a way, a time of rethinking how you were
going to apply harmony, because traditional music came down to
the 20th century with essentially very little
harmony. Right? So yeah, talk a little
bit about that as well. That connection. >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, totally. I mean, my my impression is
that, you know, certain the introduction of certain
instruments in the Baroque era, like, especially with the
piano. Right. This sort of, dominating
instrument in the, the past 400 years, just has such a. A gravitas with what that
instrument can do, and how much can be implied with an
instrument that where you're using so many fingers to, to,
to create something, you know, there's a melody and there's so
much space for, for basslines and chords and, harmony in
all these ways that, it seems like figures heavily
into, the, the language around baroque music. You know,
people talk about about Bach. Right? And it's always like
there's always like this focus on the, the harmony and like
Bach's harmonic sensibilities or genius or what have you. Right. So it seems like sort of
a, a focus, in that sense, but then also right in the, in
the traditional music context, like you say, a lot of these
tunes are traditionally unaccompanied, or the way I've
come to think about it is that, you're always sort of
putting your interpretive interpretation or interpolation
of, of the harmony onto, on top of this tune in the sense that
this tune is in G. But even as soon as you
start to play a G chord on top of the tune, you're already
interpreting the harmony because it's - it's not really there in
any dogmatic or scripted way. So this feeling is that
you're, you're playing this, this chord or this bassline or
this counterpoint, and you're kind of immediately adding
something or improvising along with the melody, which figures
heavily into the the way that the baroque harmony works when
you're kind of looking at this bassline and it's loaded with
these suggestions for what you might play in addition to this
bass note that's written here. Right. Which in itself is
maybe a suggestion, or the bassline is sort of the thing
that gets written down. And then these, these options
of how to interpret what you do with that. Yeah. >> Maura Scanlin: And then of course
in the trad, the Irish component of the, like the ceili band
wasn't a thing until, you know, the, the - later on and prior to
that, the - the music for dance was provided by one single
person, one single musician. Whether that, I guess it
was Piper probably. Or with voice. >> Conor Hearn: Something loud. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. And so the addition of harmony
or accompaniment in, in the turad style is actually
it's very late. Yeah. Yeah. So anyways. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, I mean, even in
the ceili bands, you tend to have everybody playing in unison and
then you have a piano or guitar, you know, later examples. So yeah. No, that's that's
really interesting. Yeah. So we're talking a
lot about the sort of harmonic, principles on the guitar. What about the, the fiddle
harmony? Like, I noticed that there's
somewhat more of drones and double stops in your playing
than you would hear in a typical Irish music concert, for
example. So how are you thinking about
harmony when you're playing fiddle? Yeah. >> Maura Scanlin: Well. When I'm playing, when we
arrange music together, we, we talk about various, like,
variations that we might want to put in. And some of those
variations are harmonic variations, like, oh, this
phrase, like it actually goes to the five chord, but we're going
to we want to impose a four chord on there. So I'm going to
play a different note underneath. Like I'm going to
support that four chord that Conor is going to play by
playing, altering the melody actually of a tune. And that's actually how I come
up with a lot of variations and things. We kind of. Just go for something that's
that's a little different than what what is actually there
suggested even in the melody. And I think that. That's a really fun,
expression that I love to kind of explore, and I think it
helps breathe some new life into these tunes that have been
around for ages and perhaps have been harmonized for the same
way for ages and ages and ages. And how does it actually sound
if we, you know, start at tune on this other chord that, you
know, maybe somebody else wouldn't have necessarily
thought to try, and it just adds a little bit of a flavor, if
you will. And, a little bit of
variation, like Conor was saying, like, instead of
playing the same thing three times in a row, what we will
really intentionally try to kind of vary it from time to time
and, yeah. And of course, in the, the
Corelli that we played in the, the concert, that there was one
piece, the Allegro was that was actually written very
sort of specifically, more very equal voices between the
two of us. But there were specific
chords that were, that were notated in the music that were
not figured bass. It was very specifically
notated. So I was playing all of those
notes as well. And I just though that in a
way, it actually kind of boxes you in because. Then you're playing what is
written there, and there's not as much room for for that
improvisation that we were talking about earlier. >> Conor Hearn: Right. Yeah. >> Steve Winick: I noticed also in the,
the personal version of Lilliburlero. Right. Or the version that you played,
there are some notes different to what you normally hear when
it's played as a, as a jig or as a traditional tune. Is that was
that coming from the manuscript? I mean, is that how he wrote
it, or was that a sort of middle way that you found to play that
tune? >> Maura Scanlin: I'd say some of
both. Yeah. We looked at several,
several editions of that and the notes tracked across the
several that we, that we referred to. I'm not sure
that I saw a manuscript of that, however, there was a
lot of variation that was happening in that tune. And,
this definitely within the realm of possibility that I was
playing it the Maura Scanlin way. And. >> Conor Hearn: And I think kind of
intentionally we, we took that melody and wanted to make it
feel as, as an Irish jig as possible. So, rhythmically
and ornamentally, we're kind of adding a lot of lift to, to the
way, we found it figured in, some of the, the, the ways
we came across it, there was more of, like a bare bones or
stripped down melody as we found it. And someone was mentioning
to me, that the one of like, the way I like, interpreted
the, the melody with like a dominant chord or a secondary
dominant chord was not something that they had heard before.
But, it was it was the way I had heard the melody when I
heard an F natural in the melody or whatever. So that's right. That's how it came out. And I
think that to a certain extent that was, us making some
educated guesses about the harmony. Yeah, yeah, yeah. >> Steve Winick: So yeah, chord
choices and chord voicings are both things that you're thinking about a
lot when you put these together. >> Conor Hearn: Absolutely. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, absolutely. Great. So one last thing about
the concert, which is, your creative, incorporation of
the field recordings into the concert itself. So you had
Mickey Doherty, introduce a tune with a with a nice story. And you also actually had
him play along with you or in between you, your two versions
of or your two tunes. So that's something I never
heard before. I've heard we've done that
before. Had the introduction from the
field recording and then play the tune, but I've never heard
anyone actually match up their playing, you know, before and
after. Was that difficult to do to
synchronize that way? >> Conor Hearn: There is some
stagecraft involved, I would say. Yeah. I mean, with the,
with the recordings from that time. Right. Like there's
this different sense of intonation and where the,
where the A sits. So, I think we found that
in the archive. It was, it was higher than
where we're playing. So it kind of got pitched down,
but then also like maybe pitched down, but then a little bit
back up because maybe he was playing in something like E
flat. But where the A sits back then
was lower. Yeah. Does that make sense. So it was like I think it was
like down a half step, but then up a little bit to kind of get
back into the relative space that we were in. Just in
terms of intonation and frequencies and stuff. So that was, that was kind
of like a fun, realization. Right? Like this, this sense of
intonation and. You know, objectivity is kind
of not there. And that's it's always kind of
in flux, right? But yeah, I mean, with the
with the recordings and the storytelling too, we just
were realizing that there's it's such a big part of the. Project and like listening to
these recordings and experiencing them. And a lot of it is very, you
know, we're on the stage and we're being relatively formal
and, trying to present it in a with, with dignity and grace. But then you look, you
listen to these recordings and a lot of them are hilarious. And, you know, there's all this
joy in them. So we just kind of wanted
to bring some of that to, to the audience as well as, like
there's there's so much good content in there that,
folks don't necessarily get to experience when they're
watching us play. So. Yeah. >> Maura Scanlin: And I think that it
shows also just the, the magic of the way that the oral tradition was
passed down both in storytelling and in the music. And that's like, I would
say, the main thing that kind of differentiates those, the
baroque music from the traditional music, is that the
Baroque music was written down from a much earlier stage and
maybe didn't actually have that kind of element of storytelling
as much in the in the heart of that musical tradition as, as
the, the trad Irish, did. And we just we're just
listening to this story and like, nobody tells the story as
well as, like about the fairies as well as as an Irishman. So, yeah, we felt like it
was just too good to pass up. And that one in particular was
just kind of magical. But yeah. And then the, the little bit,
the little clip that we played in the, the piece called hounds
in the hair. Yeah. We just love that
sort of. I mean, he's probably
improvising right there in the recording. You know, he's he's
trying to tell a story through music. And that was also
just too good to pass up, and I didn't feel like I didn't. Nobody could play that better
than him. So just let him speak for
himself through the music. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. >> Conor Hearn: Very particularly
stylized performance. >> Steve Winick: That and amazing that
like, what we now think of as the tone poem. Right was a thing in
Irish traditional music. There are only a few of them,
but they're there in the in the field recordings that we have. So that's kind of cool. Yeah. And so the other thing I
noticed about that story is it's it's good field work too,
right? Because Mickey Doherty says it
was a very gentle place. And if you're if you've studied
Irish folklore a lot or if you're from that area, you know
what that means. But not everyone listening was
going to know what that means. And the field worker came in
and said, you know, so what? What did you mean when you said
it was a gentle place? And Mickey. Yeah. Expands on that. Well, there
were. >> Steve Winick: Many very cool about. Yeah. >> Conor Hearn: How helpful it is to
have an astute interviewer. >> Steve Winick: Yeah, yeah. It was that's an interesting
thing to notice about that as well. So, so yeah. So I think we've talked a lot
about the concert, but maybe we should talk about some of the
other things that you guys do, together and individually. So this wasn't a typical Rakish
performance. What would a typical Rakish
concert look like? >> Maura Scanlin: Well, these days
we pretty much entirely play music that we write. So all original
material. So this, you know, we all this
music was totally new to us, and we just put it together just
for this one show. So it was really very fun for
us, a different kind of way of working than what we're used
to. But, yeah, we have been
writing music together and separately, for the past
few years. And, now, yeah, when you
come to a typical Rakish show, it's pretty much all music that
we've written, and arranged and. Yeah. >> Conor Hearn: Sometimes. So the, there's like this
collection of original compositions that will come up
with together or somebody will compose and then we'll revise
together and kind of arrange together in that process that
we're touching on earlier. And sometimes there might
be like some sort of inspiration for, for the music, like it
might, there might be a piece of poetry or something like that
that then gets set to music, collaboratively that we didn't
come up with the text, but then the music we come up with and
are kind of defamiliarizing and recontextualizing this piece of
poetry or music, or with music rather. Right. So that's kind of what the
the show is looking like sometimes these days, but it's
always kind of writing new stuff and, developing new - new
ideas to and new ways to present something, even if it's an
older work or set of texts. Yeah. Interesting. >> Steve Winick: Yeah. And then
individually or you're doing other things as well. So, I guess we'll
start with Conor this time. What are your other projects
that are not Rakish, right. >> Conor Hearn: Yeah. I mean, I think
Rakish is, something that I am the most creatively involved in at the
moment. I feel like I used to be more
actively involved in a number of things, especially,
pre-pandemic, that kind of. The pandemic has simplified a
lot of things for a lot of us. Right. So, that some of
those aren't really active anymore, or presently. But I've always kind of had
a career of playing the guitar for a lot of different artists
and, and musicians, songwriters, a lot of fiddle
players, a lot of melody players that I, I guess I would say I
specialize in accompanying fiddle players or, you know,
traditional musicians. So that that's been a big,
part of my learning experience and, career trajectory is,
is playing with a lot of different, really great,
great musicians and, folks who I will kind of get, you
know, hired to play for or honestly, it's something that I
really like doing is like subbing for for other great
other really great accompanists and, folks who are just so
prolific and active that they can't always be in the three
places that somebody wants them to be. So then I get to jump in
and sort of learn, learn parts, come up that someone else came
up with that I really admire and look up to. So that's a nice,
way to kind of move through the traditional and original
artist space is just, you know, getting to learn someone's
music. And yeah, you're like, okay, I
can I'm going to try to do my best in this band and also put
my own spin on things. And so that's that's a nice way
of getting to do some of that. I play with a fiddle player
a lot right now named Louise Bacon. She's from Orkney in the
north of Scotland. And she has a cool project
that, she's touring around right now. So that's been a fun
quartet to play in, with her and her husband and my brother. It's kind of a nice little,
little unit that we get to. We get to take out on the road
sometimes as well. >> Steve Winick: Very cool. All right. And what about you,
Maura? >> Maura Scanlin: I'm involved in a
more classical string quartet called the Rasa String Quartet. And, we. Are playing a lot of music
these days, collaboration, sometimes across genre
collaborations with another musician who comes from a
different genre than the classical music that we kind of
play together. And. Yeah, that. Let's see, I play with. Rosa and I play with Rakesh. And, this past year,
actually in 2023, I released a solo record for the first time,
and that was a really fun project for me to get to work
on. And we toured it, as a
quartet. Conor was a part of that
quartet and as well as. Two other incredible musicians,
Adam Hendy playing bouzouki and Julian Pinelli playing fiddle. So we toured that in
January of 2023. So 2024? >> Conor Hearn: Yeah, that was this. That was this year. This year. Yeah. Wow. Time flies. Yeah. >> Maura Scanlin: So anyways.
Yeah. >> Steve Winick: All right. And, so a
little bird told me that you have a residency at Exeter
Academy. Is that. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. Well, last year, my string
quartet. Yeah. Was in residence at
Exeter, and, got to do a few workshops and and concerts
there. Cool. Yeah. Working with some
of the students on the music that they're working on. And
yeah, it was very, very fun. >> Steve Winick: Awesome. Well, I was
also told and then forgot to ask you about your violin, which is
apparently a very cool instrument. Yeah. >> Maura Scanlin: Well, I'm just
absolutely smitten with this instrument that I, that I bought, in,
I think I bought it in October or September. But it's a
violin from 1872 by an American maker who was making violins in
Boston. Both him and his brother
had a kind of violin making institution. But anyway, Asa
White was the name of the guy who made this instrument. Yeah. It's just really wild
experience to get to kind of live in Boston and then find
out find out that I find an instrument that I absolutely
love that was also made in Boston on Tremont Street, of
all places. >> Steve Winick: That's cool. >> Maura Scanlin: Yeah. And it's
this very kind of unique instrument. It doesn't look like anything
that either of the brothers made before or after. I think it's kind of a collage
instrument. It has a very unique scroll
that is, quite a bit bigger than your average violin
scroll. It's almost the size of a small
viola scroll. And the it's a maggini
copy, so it has a bit of a longer shape. And of course the double
purfling it has some unique visual characteristics. But I think the, the slight
length of the instrument and the added length of the scroll give
it a really unique resonance. And it has a really beautiful
tone that I just fell in love with. >> Steve Winick: Very cool. Yeah. We've had David Bromberg here
talking about American violins because he's a major collector,
definitely of historical American violins. And it's
great to know that you're continuing that tradition and
playing on on a historical instrument. Yeah. Sounds wonderful. So, so I should say that if
you want to find that interview with David Bromberg, you can
look on the Library of Congress website. But more importantly,
if you've come across this interview separately from the
concert, you might want to check out the concert itself so you
can hear the great music that we're talking about. And that
is separate from this video on the Library of Congress website
or on the Library of Congress YouTube channel. So I guess what's left is to
thank the members of Rakish Conor and Maura. Thank you so much for being
here with us. >> Maura Scanlin: Thank you so much.
It's been such an honor and a privilege for us to get to meet you all
and work. Work here. >> Steve WInick: Yeah. Thanks once again.
