Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

In March I started offering Saturday two-hour workshops once a month; yesterday was our second. These are especially for folks who don’t have time during the week for private lessons, or who prefer to learn in a group, but all are welcome.

These first two workshops focused on chords and backup. We talked about how to spell chords (how to know what notes belong in a chord), and worked on ways to use the chords to backup a tune, using Liberty mostly and also Ash Grove a little bit.

The next one is scheduled for May 20, 2:30-4:30, $20, and the topic will be beginning solo arranging. I’ll likely talk about some of the same ideas I’ve written about in my arranging article.

The Ithaca Farmers Market has been going since the first weekend in April. I made my first appearance today, and was fortunate to be able to play.

There are still lots of empty booths, but soon enough the market will be full.

It was a lovely sunny day, even though a stiff wind from the lake kept me chilled, standing in the shade of the market’s pavilion.

I was able to play about three hours, which is exciting, considering the tendinitis situation. I might have even played longer, except I was cold and running out of ideas and thought it would be better not to push it just yet. After all, since the Christmas season I haven’t played longer than an hour, even practicing at home.

It was nice to be back at my favorite venue. To see the friendly crowd and some familiar faces of vendors and visitors. And the chicken curry over udon noodles was a lovely lunch for a windy day.

I’ve tweaked the Boxed Apart theme for 800-pixel screen widths. Check it out using the Theme list in the sidebar.

Sam Rizzetta is the guy largely responsible for what modern American hammered dulcimers are like. He’s also a teacher at workshops, a performer, a recording artist, author of instructional material, and continues to build innovative dulcimers.

He now has a website at http://samrizzetta.com, where you can see pictures of him and his work, read about his background and his instruments, find out where he’s performing next, or order books and recordings.

The site is my design, using WordPress as a CMS (content management system). WordPress is also the program I use for this blog. I decided to use it for Sam’s site because its interface is easy to use and doesn’t require much — if any — knowledge of code.

Designing the site meant creating a theme via a CSS stylesheet and adapting existing WordPress PHP theme templates, finding and implementing plugins to use a static front page and to make the search feature work properly, and creating the pages. I also used PhotoShop to create the background image from the rosette photo used in the header.

Anyone else need a simple, easy-to-maintain site?

I forgot to post the one picture I got at this spring’s UPDF before my batteries gave up (I know, I should have brought some spares).

Bill Mitchell, of Peat and Barley, playing his Dusty Strings D-600.