Vol #1   Issue #1   May, 2004
Making Waves:
Hitting the Airwaves All Over the World
Marley's Ghost Recording 8th CD with Van Dyke Parks
Notes from The Wintergrass Festival and our Wintergrass Coloring Contest Winners
Streaming Audio Coming Soon to the Sage Arts Website
Colossal Record Collection Moves In
Events:
Dan Wheetman's
It Ain't Nothin' but the Blues
through May 8
Seattle Repertory Theater
Seattle Center
206-443-2222
www.seattlerep.org
Marley's Ghost
Seattle Folklife Festival
Seattle Center
-Friday, May 28, 7:15-9 pm; Fountain Lawn Stage
-Sunday, May 30, 2:20-2:50 pm; Rainier Room as part of the live Community Radio Broadcast Project. The performance can be heard live on the following FM stations:

-Olympia and Tacoma, WA
KAOS 89.3
-Seattle and Bellevue, WA
KBCS 91.3
-Everett and Lynnwood, WA
KSER 90.7
-Bellingham, WA
KUGS 89.3
-Portland, OR
KBOO 90.7

Solo Performances at the EMP Liquid Lounge:
-Dan Wheetman; Saturday, May 29, 4:20-4:50 pm
-Ed Littlefield, Jr; Saturday, May 29, 5:00-5:30 pm
-Mike Phelan; Monday, May 31, 5:30-5:55 pm
www.nwfolklife.org
Hank Bradley
Plays Greek music at
Georgia's Greek Restaurant
323 NW 85th, Seattle, WA
6-10pm
Selected Friday and Saturday nights.
All ages welcome, no cover.
206-783-1228
www.georgiagreekrestaurant.com
TIME, PLACE AND MUSIC
Ed Littlefield talks about the connections

Going to the West
Joy of Old Time Music
*Musical Geography
MUSICAL GEOGRAPHY
We play country music...
We don't necessarily specify what country

I believe that music evokes some kind of a mood, a certain theme.

Country music got its name because the music resonated with a country or rural existence. When I think of people playing fiddle tunes, it invokes an old timey, rural setting: drinking whiskey and beer and playing on the back porch or in the kitchen.

When you play jazz, you don't think of cows chewing their cud out in the field. You think of the urban existence: martinis, modern furniture, glass cocktail tables, skyscrapers, and traffic jams.

When I think of Baroque music, I think of fancy palaces and formal French gardens. I see lots of gold plated furniture and cherubim flying around. Baroque music was court music written by the professional commercial writers of the time for the aristos who had an ordered vision of the world.

Pat Sinclair once described heavy metal music as "walking the dinosaur".

If you hear Ragtime, you think of the 1900s. The Charleston evokes the 1920s. Big Band evokes the 1940-50s. Disco...uh, let's not go there.

Songs like "Kingdom Coming" were often used in cartoons and in movies. Any time they wanted to evoke the 1850-60s, they'd use a fiddle tune of that time. By simply playing that tune, they cue the audience to that timeframe.

The album Going to the West is very much the music that comes from the farm. We do a lot of social dancing: contradances and waltzes. Going to the West is a collection of mostly old time tunes or songs. Vintage lyrics from a Civil War era tune, "Kingdom Coming" by Henry Clay Work, are on our web site. "Miss Julia's Waltz" is an original composition in a style reminiscent of those times.

~Ed Littlefield, Jr.
Continue: Front Page
Page 2: Going to the West
Page 3: Joy of Old Time Music
*Page 4: Musical Geography
Making Waves

SAGE ARTS NEWS
To unsubscribe from the Sage Arts Newsletter
send an email with "Unsubscribe" in the subject line to sagearts@sagearts.com.

  Site design by Squeaky Fiddle © 2000-2004