Please Note: The NAFCo Conference special rate allocations in the Premier Travel Inn are now fully booked for Wednesday 26 July, however there is still availability for the other nights of the event. On Wednesday, we have spaces available in the basic student flats, or you can try to book direct through the Premier Travel Inn on 0870 990 6300 or +(0)1224 624 080
At the heart of the NAFCo idea is the synergy created by the combination of an academic conference and a performance celebration. The 2006 theme of Connecting Cultures in tradition will provide a unique forum for papers on the role of the fiddler (or dancer), musical interplay with dance, socialisation and competition, leadership and transmission, tradition and innovation, and cross-cultural relationships.
We are privileged at the convention to be addressed by four eminent keynote speakers:
Dr Alan Jabbour is former Head of the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress, a position he held from 1976 to 1999. In ‘Fiddle Tunes of the Old Frontier’, Dr Jabbour will be speaking about the relationship between Old World and New World fiddle traditions, advancing the proposition that all the modern regional fiddle traditions of the English-speaking world are cultural cousins – born of a wider revolution in instrumental music and dance in the last half of the eighteenth century – a revolution for which the democratized Italian violin was the central catalyzing instrument.
Professor Colin Quigley of the World Arts and Cultures Department at the University of California at Los Angeles has researched the inter-relationship of fiddle music and dance in Newfoundland and Eastern Europe. In ‘Dancing Bows and Musical Feet’, he will be considering rhythm as the most defining characteristic of local and regional style in fiddling around the North Atlantic, and especially within Canada where so much melodic material is widely shared.
Professor Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, Director of the Irish World Music Centre at the University of Limerick, is both an outstanding performer and a respected scholar. He will be talking about the remarkable fiddle traditions upheld by Gypsy Travellers in Ireland, most notably the fiddler Tommie Potts (1912-1988), with whom he undertook fieldwork.
Dr Peter Cooke, Honorary Research Fellow at SOAS, is an eminent ethnomusicologist whose research includes both Scotland and Africa. Dr Cooke will be revisiting some of his earlier research, examining common threads linking a number of geographically separated musical traditions that have given him joy during the past 50 years.
One of the great strengths of NAFCo is that it draws on scholars who are also fine performers, as is Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin. This is also true of Alan Jabbour, who is a wonderful ‘Old Time’ fiddler, in the style of the Upper South, who learnt from musicians like Henry Reed of Glen Lyn, Virginia, and Tommy Jarrell of Toast, North Carolina. Other performer-scholars offering papers include Matt Cranitch and Mats Melin of the University of Limerick, Katherine Campbell of the University of Edinburgh, Catriona Macdonald and Kathryn Tickell of the University of Newcastle, Kimberly Fraser of Saint Francis Xavier University Nova Scotia, Karin Eriksson and Mats Nilsson of the University of Gothenburg, Sherry Johnson of York University Toronto, Gaila Kirdienė of the Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, and Mary Anne Alburger and Iain Stewart of the Elphinstone Institute.
