back home on the farm.

The trip home was no less stressful than the trip out: while no instruments fell on my head--I claimed a window seat on the shuttle, out of range of falling luggage--when I went to print my boarding pass on Saturday, I discovered I had somehow booked my return flight for the same day I left, meaning I was supposed to leave on Sunday but had no flight booked. Getting home before Monday was expensive.

A variety of household stuff went dramatically poorly while I was gone, and kept going for a couple days after I got home, so in retrospect certainly the trip wasn't worth it, as amazing as it was.

I did the math later in the week, and including my lessons, I crammed about two months of playing time into a week. Physically this was not at all as hard as I expected: my decision to back off the guitar and mandolin, which use exactly the motions of the left thumb I need to learn not to use on the violin, is clearly the right one.

Every morning there were two classes with the "artist faculty," well-known (relatively) performers who span a bunch of different traditions: Scandinavian, Irish, old-time, Quebecois, Cajun, Cape Breton, and others more obscure or hybridized. After lunch there's "Band Lab," where you learn and prep a few songs to play at a dance on Friday night and a concert on Sunday. Finally the end of the day has sessions with tutorial staff, who are about the same level as the Artist Faculty, and cover the same range of styles, but not as famous.

I went to a class with Donna Hébert, who's sort of a general northeastern North America person, but then I remembered that Swedish music is why I picked up the instrument in the first place, so I mostly stayed with the Scandinavians the rest of the time. The morning teachers were Fru Skagerrak, a trio of Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish women, and they were amazing. At some point I realized I'd actually heard of Anna Lindblad (Sweden), but mostly through random YouTube videos.

Everybody was really nice! And also way above my head. Most of the time, every available space, inside and out, was full of groups that sounded like this:

That's not a specific band, just a circle of very good players. They all either know the songs, or they have the skills to pick it up as they go. Nobody called the tune, or the change. It was pretty daunting, and the only circle I was really able to join was a group of drunk twentysomethings on Friday or Saturday night, who were declining (and/or too drunk) to play at their full speed. It was fun! But I have a long way to go.

The attendees were mostly white, with a skew towards folks near or past retirement, who could take a week without working. The one non-white performer was Fiddlin' Earl White, who seems to have spent his decades moving around the country every 3-5 years collecting and transmitting fiddle repertoire. He performed in the finale concert on Saturday (open to the public, which most of the week's concerts weren't).

Now, there was a Kids Track and a Teens Track, and the teens were led by The Onlies, a group that themselves grew up going to Fiddle Tunes and the kids' and teens' programs (there's an adorable video of them kicking ass at a dance in 2011). The Onlies taught the kids a Swedish polska (not the same as a polka), and then a super-catchy fiddle tune blended with a secularized (and also catchy) tune called "I Belong To The Band, Hallelujah!".

The teens played at the public finale! They were great. Then Fiddlin' Earl White gets up and does a set with his band, then says, "That tune they played before is called 'Chips and Sauce,' by the clog dancer Ira Bernstein. And I actually taught it to The Onlies, several years ago. Here's the original."

Around and around it goes.

Fru Skagerrak played a set, too, including a bunch of Anna Lindblad's songs that I now want to learn, as it turns out she is a kick-ass songwriter. They played a convincingly Swedish tune, which was actually written by a Cajun musician, who had met the Swedish group Väsen many many years ago when they were at some music festival in Louisiana, and the Cajun guy then went home and wrote a Swedish song. Which was then performed by a Scandinavian trio, at a festival in Washington state.

Around and around it goes.

The final song of their set was this Anna Lindblad tune, from her album Med vänner ("With friends"). The dancer is Nic Gareiss (here's a great video of the two of them playing Quebecois songs), and the guitarist is the amazing Roger Tallroth from Väsen. Lindblad wrote the song about the friends and music you meet at festivals like the Tønder Festival in Denmark, where she met the other 2/3 of Fru Skagerrak. It's a Cajun/Zydeco tune, by a Swede.

Around and around it goes.