3 reasons to take up violin.

1. Ciaccona comp. Maurizio Cazzati.




2. Forked Deer, trad. perf. by Tony Trischka (banjo) & Barbara Lamb (fiddle).

HOW CAN YOU NOT WANT TO PLAY LIKE THIS



3. Folkrotsvalsen comp. Ale Carr / Mitt i Juli comp. Jonas Olsson, perf. by Dreamers' Circus.

I've been listening to this on repeat for weeks now, because it's virtuosic Vikings, referring to a bunch of Scandinavian music things that I know are there but I can't really access. That weird-ass folk-fiddle on the right is a "träskofiol," made by--I swear I'm not making this up--taking a giant wooden shoe and gluing violin fittings on it.

This raises more questions than it answers: are actual real-life clogs that big? if not, someone must make them just to be made into instruments?

There's also the nyckelharpa, with keys that look unsettlingly like a rack of ribs. As my friend once said about her year living in Finland, "the long winter does funny things to people."

(The träskofiol player wrote the waltz-y first piece, before swapping the träskofiol for a cittern, member of a bizarrely diverse and widespread family of similarly-shaped instruments, including that great harbinger of globalization, the Irish bouzouki.)



I particularly want to play Mitt i Juli someday, which means I probably will, since the melody line is freely available, and its basic form is not rocket science. I can't find anything about the fiddle player who wrote it, though, except Dreamers' Circus saying he died fairly recently.

Funny story: I was playing this for my violin teacher:

"Wait... that guy in the middle..."
"Danish String Quartet?"
"Yes! Those guys are awesome!"

And of course she's met them, which hadn't occurred to me, but of course the world of professional string quartets would be small, and even more so for the under-40 crowd.