It’s a Friday night in Oberlin, and like most arts articles that begin with lines such as “it’s a Friday night in Oberlin,” this one doesn’t take place in any atmosphere where college students are doing the things that college students on MTV Spring Break seem typically to do. Such an opening is getting to be cliché. Someone should stop trying to surprise us and instead run something like this: “it’s a Friday night in Oberlin, and as you’d expect, everyone is f**d up and dancing with their pants off to ‘99 Problems’.” But most of those things just don’t fit into this tame little article.
Actually, the dancing with no pants kind of does fit—one Friday a month, in the Conservatory Orchestra Room or Wilder Main, as many men as women are likely to trade their Levis for audaciously-patterned gypsy skirts and prance barefoot to the sounds of the Black River Ironworks, Oberlin’s newest contra dance band. Made up of Corey Walters ’07 on flute, Jonah Sidman ’09 on fiddle, Michael Berkowitz ’07 on guitar and Elyse Underhill ’09 on piano and accordion, the band has enjoyed a steady stream of gigs in Oberlin, Columbus, and as far away as Michigan lately. How does a traditional music band go on the road? Well, says Walters, with a lot of getting caught in traffic. But otherwise, a little differently than everyone else.
After playing a dance or two “by accident,” some version of the band, at the time without the Oberlin-evocative name, went on what Walters describes as a tour “down the Mid-Atlantic part of the East Coast” over Winter Term, stopping in Princeton, Harrisburg, Frederick, and Glen Echo Park, near D.C. Much of the tour was booked through sheer luck. “David Giusti [who was a caller with the band during January] and I were working on a farm together last summer,” says Walters, “so we had countless hours to talk about contra dancing. We got to thinking, we got hired at one place, why don’t we just see if we can email dances and say ‘let’s play these places too’? And surprisingly a lot of them were like yeah, come play for us, having never heard us before.”
Regular contra dances, some of which can happen as often as weekly, are usually surrounded by strong and loyal communities of dancers, callers, musicians, and the occasional bake-sale organizer. It’s not unusual, in some areas, to see an entire family at a dance together. This focus on continuity extends to how dances hire their live musicians, say the BRI. It makes the series of gigs the group booked through email all the more amazing. “[There’s one band], Yankee Ingenuity, [who plays in Cleveland.]” noted Walters. “They’ve been playing that dance for like 25 years. We’re not really playing anywhere in the
At the same time, though, a lot of dances are impressed with new blood. Contra “is not exactly part of the popular culture,” said Sidman. “For the most part [dance organizers] are very eager to have new and young people play.” At most of the dances they play these days, BRI encounters a mix of ages, but it depends on location—in a college town, says Underhill, you’re obviously going to see a lot more college-age dancers. There are probably more now than there were even a few years ago. In lots of cities, home-schooling communities have also gotten involved with contra or other types of folk dancing. Is contra dancing hip now? Maybe, said Walters.
“Hip” may mean that more young, classically trained musicians are gravitating toward traditional music, and becoming quite successful. In the world of folk festivals, this is definitely a trend—neo-traditional bands like Crooked Still, which boasts the first string player admitted to the Berklee College of Music on a full scholarship, headlines festivals in upstate
Two out of the four BRI members, Underhill and Berkowitz, are Conservatory students, and Walters has some classical flute training. Sidman agreed that classically-trained musicians playing folk music is a trend, but not a new one. At the same time, says Underhill, who is a music composition major and also plays classical piano, it’s not necessarily popular to play traditional music as a classical musician.
“It’s not something people at the Con would encourage,” she said.
Another issue, she noted, is the “different energy” it takes to play in either tradition. Walters put in that many traditional music communities frown on markers of classical training. “When I started going to [trad. music] sessions in Baltimore, I only had my classical silver flute,” he said, “and people really looked down on that...[There’s the idea that] you should either play classical or traditional, because switching back and forth leads to a lot of complications in the method.”
Whatever those complications, the BRI are not the only musicians to straddle the crossover line. “One of the fiddlers we’re bringing to the Dandelion Romp actually teaches violin at the New England Conservatory,” says Walters. But don’t think the transition is seamless at the professional level, either—“You can really hear it in her playing [that she’s a classical musician].”
At Oberlin, the Conservatory may overpower the traditional music scene, even while contra dancers frolic among the kettledrums once a month—but events like the upcoming Dandelion Romp dance weekend make room for contra dancing at Oberlin to form a sustained, larger community. The college student dancers and players may be just passing through, but “[Other] people know about Oberlin,” said Underhill. “At the dances we play in Columbus or Cleveland there are always people who have been to Oberlin dances.”
The Ironworks will continue the year with a serious gigging schedule, traveling next to
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