“Stop fiddling with that or you’ll break it!”
“I fiddled around with it enough that I finally got it to work”
        -Kate MacLeod, quoting her father


“Stop fiddling around!” I spent most of my school years in a fog of missed deadlines. I never knew about schedule changes, when my homework was due, or sometimes even what class I was in… I still vividly remember looking up from reading a book and discovering that the kids sitting around me weren’t the ones I had been sitting next to when class started. I must have totally missed a class change! It wasn’t that I didn’t pay attention, it was just that my attention was always drawn to the wrong thing, like a really good book, where I was going hiking after school, or how to construct a robot of myself so life like no one could ever tell if it was me or my robot sitting in that school desk.
 
I was one of those kids whose pockets, if turned out, could have probably filled a small rucksack. I was terrified of being caught with nothing to do (which was pretty much my view of “appropriate” school behavior) and so had enough materials with me, on the sly, to keep my attention occupied precisely where it shouldn’t have been. I still remember the day I realized that all the desks and tables height was adjusted with Alan screws. Most kids my age didn’t even know what an Alan screw was back then, but my dad was quite the tinkerer and I knew just where I could find the tool I wanted. I spent plenty of time working on a look of decided innocence and mild disinterest when puzzled teachers had to reseat classmates whose desks were now to small or too tall, or call the custodian when a table collapsed because the screw on one leg had suddenly given way. I didn’t view myself as a troublemaker, just a very curious student of the world around me. I couldn’t understand why my teachers valued repetition and sitting still more than imagination and movement.

 My interest in music started at the age of four when I saw a performance of a violin concerto on the television at home. My parents traded and bartered to afford the cost of classical training with a family friend who played in the Utah Symphony. There is a VERY specific way to play the violin that has been carefully honed, honored, and cherished over the past 500 years. My instructor initiated me into the world of etudes, exercises, and note reading (with somewhat sporadic success) and I made reasonable if not stellar progress. I was expected to practice a lot. (Often two hours a day or more). As I advanced into more difficult music my teacher prescribed an abacus which I was to use to carefully count the number of times I played a difficult passage
  correctly (often 50 or 100 times were ordered). I found the structure stifling and the repetition mind numbing. My sight reading skills negligible, my attention span crumbling, I often turned to the instrument and simply fiddled around, following my dancing thoughts up and down the fingerboard, growling with anger, or laughing with delight. Luckily I was blessed to have one of those rare teachers who could honor imagination and passion as well as rote learning. She always told me that to play music you had to be like a tiger, you had to take a risk and leap at the prey or you stood no chance at getting what you wanted.
 
I switched to Viola when I was 11. This more introspective instrument was a better fit.  As the “poet-philosopher” of the string family its deeper tone and more dreamy nature spoke to me. Still, I found myself wasting my practice time “fiddling around,” making up tunes, trying out tones. I carried my passion for Viola into college, pursuing a double major of Music Composition and Viola Performance, but, as usual, I got involved in too many things and my graduation languished on the periphery of unfinished projects and an overbooked schedule. My composition teacher eventually forced me to make a choice. He advised me to drop one side of my double major and progress on toward graduation. Agonizing on which side of myself to favor, performance or composition, I finally went with the latter, feeling  it offered more room for my “fiddling around.”
 
From the start it should have been clear I was more of a fiddler than a violinist. Naturally curious, I spent hours exploring the sounds the instrument could make. The fiddle is a remarkable canvas for the imagination. An embodiment of paradox, it can both break and heal the soul. Perhaps that’s why so many folks have been frightened or dismissive of the fiddle, it represents something other than business as usual. It refuses to sit silent, or still. A tool of dreamers and prophets it can both create and destroy. It can set the feet of the righteous dancing down the path to hell, stich up a broken heart, or leave one grasping on the edge of epiphany. It caters to those whose attention wanders the roads less traveled and whose feet march to the rhythm of a music only they can hear. As a musical explorer, the fiddle keeps me on the sharp edge of discovery; exploring new sounds and techniques, diving into the deep waters of tradition, or gathering the strands of a new song out of the immense shimmering firmament of notes. The fiddle can stand the strain due not to its rigidity, but because of its flexibility.  For a long time fiddling was a secret side affair for me, something I did when I should have been doing something else. Now I realize that everything else was just getting in the way of fiddling.

“Today, like every other day, we wake up empty and  frightened.
Don't open the door to the study and begin reading.
Take down a musical instrument.
Let the beauty we love be what we do.
There are hundreds of ways to kneel and kiss the ground.”
 
-Rumi
 
We spent Memorial Day weekend in Lake Tahoe performing at Marriott’s Timber Lodge resort which is nestled comfortably at the base of Heavenly Mountain on the South Shore of Lake Tahoe.  The weather cooperated Nicely leaving us with light blue skies and the deeper and more mysterious blue of the lake.  Our Muses have three cousins who live in the area and spent the whole weekend playing hard. We had some pleasant hours out on the beach, hunting Crawdaddies, playing in the sand, or just quietly listening to the pulse of the planet.

Sunday we performed a couple of sets out on the patio near the Gondola and ended up with a great crowd, many of whom braved 2 hours of sun to stay for both sets. Afterwards, a group of listeners came over to talk with us. They had been finishing up a round of drinks and were planning to go for a short hike before heading home early from vacation later that day but heard us sing a snippet of one of our songs during our sound check and decided to stay and hear a couple of tunes. Two hours later they said they had decided to extend the vacation another day or so and told us how much the music had meant to them and how it had opened them up and helped them relax into their vacation instead of rushing back home to work.

I am constantly amazed at the power music has to connect us deeply to our souls, to each other, to humanity, to our planet, and to the universe.  Hearing from others, the difference our music made to them is always humbling. I still remember years ago the first time I heard the Indigo Girls on the radio. I was driving home from work and pulled in to a record store because I had to buy that song so I could listen to it again and again. I
remember how much certain songs helped shape the course of my life, opening up in me the courage and passion to face a struggle, or at other times, providing safe passage for sorrows that seemed too great to bear.  This is the reason I call myself a Folk musician, because the music doesn’t just belong to me, it belongs to everyone it touches. My friend Utah Slim once said to me that “music opens me to myself.” I’ve thought of his words many times since then. The music that moves me most opens my heart to let me peer a little deeper into my true nature, It opens a door or a window into my soul and leaves me looser and more open than I was before, it connects me outward to the people I am with and the planet I’m on and the universe I gaze outward at on dark nights. I don’t know how it works, but it is the closest thing I’ve ever found to magic. There’s something about music, that reminds me that we’re all in this together, that we were all once (the stuff we’re made of at least) part of some long extinguished star, that our hearts are never as separate as we might think. 

Most of our drive back to life as usual in Salt Lake was stormy and both the muses and their parents were beginning to get irritable, but late in the evening the clouds parted and the sun illuminated a Rainbow that arced right over the road home like a gateway into Oz. “Maybe,” I thought, “music is the light that lets us see the beauty of the moment that we were blind to before.”  As a folk musician, I love sharing the music that flows from my heart and out into the world, where it mingles with the hearts of others and comes back to me richer and more pure! If that isn’t a gateway to a magic kingdom, I don’t know what is.