Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller and today I'm bringing you a setting of The Lark on the Strand from a session at the Bru House in Dublin, Ireland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you're well, having a great day today. Because it's the very first episode I'm going to talk a little bit about how I got into fiddle and fiddling. I started the violin at a very young age, I was three years old, when I began taking violin lessons and learning the violin. I had a lot of exposure to traditional music through my parents who were folk singers and musicians, and my father especially, John Wobus, plays the piano. And he also plays a lot of other instruments, including the fiddle. So he was very interested in traditional music, and he would teach me fiddle tunes, we would play them together on fiddle and piano, and he also played a lot of records for me.
One of the records we listened to a lot was the Miller brothers because they played on fiddle and piano. So I was exposed to a lot of that New England sound from a very early age. It was Rodney Miller on the fiddle, and his brother, I believe, Randy Miller on the piano, and they sounded really good. When I played with my dad, we really went for that sound, fiddle and piano, very traditional.
We also listened to a lot of a lot of Liz Carroll, a real Irish sound out of Chicago, and another fiddler from north of the border, French Canadian named Jean Carignon. His bowing is so good. I as a kid, I did not understand how he could be getting that sound. And even later on when I was older, and I had learned classical bow strokes, like sautille, et cetera, I still could not replicate the sound that he got with his bow. He really was amazing. I heard he was a taxi driver. Actually, if you are not familiar with Jean Carignon, you want to hear some amazing French-Canadian fiddling do go check him out.
When I got older, my dad could bring me along to a gig. So he would play with his band for Contra dances. He mostly played piano if I knew a tune or two, I could sit in and play with the band. And I liked doing that. And when I got old enough that I knew enough tunes maybe 12, 13 years old, my dad went ahead and booked a gig for him and me to do on fiddle and piano and that was when we started playing our band was called Contranella. We took the word contra dance and the word Petronella. And we just combined them Contranella. Way back then in the I guess early 90s is when we pick the name and we stuck with it ever since.
When we still play, we call ourselves Contranella, now my husband sits in. So we started playing dances and playing for dances has been my primary mode of performing on fiddle. I have played occasional concerts, I definitely teach a lot of fiddle. I love jamming and you know playing in kitchens. My first love was always playing for dancers for contra dances.
So that's a little bit about my background as a fiddler. Our tune for today is from a session at the Bru House in the Fairview neighborhood of Dublin. I went to Ireland in June with my family, my husband and my three kids. We had a great time I will talk about it more on future podcasts. But one of the things that we did was we went to this session that was held we were staying in the neighborhood of Clontarf and just down the road and Fairview they had a weeknight session at a bar called the Bru House.
They had a wonderful session there that night and one of the tunes they played is the Lark on the Strand. This tune is a jig in G major. You can find people arguing a little bit about the A part which is based around the A is a resting tone. Maybe it's A modal, but the B part is definitely in G major. And for me, I'll just think about it as a G major jig. If I'm wondering where to put it in a set, G major works. You can find the sheet music for this tune at my website, which is called Fiddle Studio, just like the name of the podcast. You can go to fiddle studio.com, I'll go ahead and post the sheet music there.
When I was looking into this tune, I also saw it under the name of the Stolen Purse. So you might find it there but most people call it the Lark on the Strand. It's a very old tune, it was mentioned in the O'Neill's Irish collection from 1850. So older than that, not a clear composer on this tune. I found a nice recording of it online played by Thomas Keenan on a Paddy Keenan album. He had an early album with some siblings, including Thomas there's a recording on that album of this tune played on the whistle. It's on YouTube check that out and sounded really good.
So, Charley and I are going to play it here for you. I'll be on the fiddle and my husband Charley Beller is playing guitar. Ready. Hey, thanks so much for listening you can head over to fiddlestudio.com for the sheet music to this and all of the tunes I teach. I'll be back next time with another tune for you, have a wonderful day.
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