Alistair Anderson & Mary Macnamara @ Proitzer Muehle

[conzertino]

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the German Concertina-Meeting we have invited several great teachers to our seminar-center in the North of Germany. There will be a variety of workshops for beginners, intermediate and advanced players and other goodies!

 

There is a lot of music available online to get started - and we will cater for the English-speakers!

 

Check out www.concertinas.de and look for the English link...

Edited February 12, 2011 by conzertino

[RAc]

well, it's been a few days now since the meeting took place, and since nobody else has done that so far, I'll volunteer for a recap. Please bear in mind that I'm both a relative newcomer to the concertina scene and an oddball (playing Crane Duet), so if some of the following remarks should be trivial or out of place, please point this out to me in PM, and I'll happily weave the input into this review.

 

First for the trivia: Of those I could identify, the following forum mebers were present: Stephen Chambers (who gave a lecture on concertina history which unfortunately I could not attend), Jim Lucas (who generously gave me a private lesson which I thoroughly enjoyed), Henrik Müller (who plays a killer concertina), Nils (now a teacher at the grade school I attended many many years ago - how's that for coincidences?), conzertino (the Nick of Robert Pich who organized and moderated the meeting) and myself (the one with the dog). Apologies to everybody I left out; that's probably because I couldn't attach your real life name w/ your Nick and/or don't visit the forum frequently enough to know everybody who contributes. Participants came mostly from Germany, but there was also a solid number of players from Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, the British isles, Switzerland, Austria and other countries present. Not to forget of course the presence of Jürgen Suttner who patiently and generously took care of the various medical needs of our instruments.

 

Now. Although the highlights naturally were MaryMcNamara and Alistair Anderson (it is always a treat to not only experience world class musicians but also be able to receive instruction from them - there was more than one revelation for me in Alistair's beginning Englisch Concertina class, even if I wouldn't hesitate to dub his teaching to me as pearls before swine), I was amazed at the very high skill level of the staff and a good number of the participants.

 

As is the case probably everywhere, in Germany the concertina is mainly used for Irish dance music, so the weighting was (my gut feeling) 65% anglo, 33.5% english (of which a good part also dealt with reels, jigs, hornpipes and polkas) and the rest oddballs like me or German concertina players, and the evening agenda consisted mostly of irish type sessions in which fiddlers, flutists, bag pipers and guitar players joined in (there seem to be many multi instrumentalists among concertina session players). Yet the classes exposed quite a lot of diversity in musical styles; notably, Rainer Süßmilch introduced the English playing community to hardcore Jazz on the Concertina, and Robert has a number of arrangements of classical and Kletzmer tunes in his repertoire.

 

Aside from the musical treat in every respect (that refers to the instruction as well as the sessions and the performances), I also want to point out that the Proitzer Mühle (also run by Robert) is the perfect location for this kind of meeting. The location, the food, the care for the guests, the feeling of being warmly welcome, the staff at the Mühle - all of that deserves topmost grades. The agenda turned out to be very flexible (classes were frequently shifted, swapped, collated or split), but I wouldn't call this a drawback, rather a spontaneous adaption to the varying needs of everyone as the meeting proceeded. I got plenty out of the weekend and would like to extend my thanks to everyone who made this a very enjoyable, instructive and fun event.

Edited March 29, 2011 by Ruediger R. Asche

[JimLucas]

well, it's been a few days now since the meeting took place, and since nobody else has done that so far, I'll volunteer for a recap. ...if some of the following remarks should be trivial or out of place, please point this out to me in PM....

You're kidding, right?

It's an excellent review (even if you did mention my name) of an excellent weekend.

 

It was absolutely marvelous!

The only "drawback" -- hardly a thing to discourage me from coming again -- was that I could only be in one place at a time.