[okchorale] Re: Folk for NEFFA?

[Joe Kesselman <keshlam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Paul Ciszek wrote:
> If we are planning a guerilla performance at NEFFA, perhaps we should
> have something folky prepared.

NEFFA spans a very wide range of styles and puts a heavy emphasis on
education, so I'm not sure it's any more necessary for us to perpare
something in the American Standard Folk tradition than it would be for a
zydeco band, or the morris dancers, or the folks doing Balkin tunes, or
the sea chanty groups, or... 

My own take -- which folks are welcome to critique -- is that "guerilla
filk" probably needs more of an emphasis on stuff which nonfilkers can
pick up quickly and understand without needing a deep filk/sf/science
background. Strong performances of strong songs which stand alone and
have sing-along or call-and-response parts might be optimal... but as
noted above, while it's good to do some participatory stuff I don't
think we're boxed into it; we could do as much or as little as we want.

So Paul's suggestion, which is an interesting one, should be viewed as
an opportunity rather than a requrement. If we want to go for it, great;
if not, that decision won't hurt us. My only concern is that we may want
to pick songs which would also work well for a filk audience... and that
we've already got a bit of a backlog. Though we're starting to get good
enough at some of our existing material that all we may need is a once-
or twice-through to help sharpen it and keep it fresh, which will give
us more time to work on new songs.


Might be worth going through Walkabout's book, and Rise Up Singing, some
time to find out how much of that material's already in our shared
repertoire and how much of it we already know harmonies for. Walkabout
had some very nice four-part-harmony stuff ... unfortunately, most of it
was collectively ad-libbed and then passed along via oral tradition,
which means that I probably know only the melody and the bass part.]]



  "When I'm Gone" is easy to learn, but then,
> I'm partial to Phil Ochs.
> 
> Last night at Psinging I learned that some 4-part rounds can be turned
> into 8-part rounds if you run two clocks in quadrature.
> 
> --
> Paul Ciszek
> pciszek@world.std.com

-- 
------------------------------------------------------
Joe Kesselman, http://www.lovesong.com/people/keshlam/
Appearing March 10 at Walkabout, a double bill:
Vance Gilbert shares our stage with Stone Soup
http://www.WalkaboutClearwater.org/coffeehouse.html