Alasdair Fraser & Natalie Haas

continued

Fraser came from Scotland to California and started a Scots fiddling school called Valley of the Moon, where Haas, a graduate of the Juilliard School, became his student. They’ve been at this for about five years, long enough to know the ins and outs of each other’s musical minds. Fraser points out that the use of a fiddle and cello together in Scots music was actually common in the eighteenth century, when the first efforts to collect Scotland’s heritage of melody were in flower. So it may be that, as with other musicians and scholars from the British Isles, he found a deeper layer of the tradition by coming across the sea.

Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas come to the Ark on Saturday, January 24.   

[Originally published in January, 2009.]