Marcy Prochaska: Hammered Dulcimer

Our pastor has asked me to play something for the Easter service.

Today I had a chance, at the beginning of Amy’s nap, to look over my tune list and run through a few possibilities.

I don’t play any specifically Easter-themed music, except the English Country Dance tune that happens to be named Easter Thursday, perhaps referring to Maundy Thursday, the night of the Last Supper, when Jesus washed the feet of his disciples.

One medley that might be appropriate is a pair of tunes written by Jerry Read Smith for his Christmas album, One Wintry Night, which goes along with the Ruth Bell Graham book by the same title. The first piece is called “The Storm” and the second is the title piece.

I couldn’t figure out how I used to play either tune. Bits and pieces came back to me as I noodled, but there’s still a fair amount that I need to recover or else rearrange.

I like including a bit of Christmas in Easter and vice versa.

Another possibility would be to just pick something pretty and joyful, even if the title doesn’t have anything to do with Easter. Something like my Third Street Market, perhaps.

And while I was looking things over, I remembered bits and pieces of other things I used to play, including a little original piece in Bb (because my extended range dulcimer makes Bb almost as playable as the more common keys) I’d forgotten about completely. It will all come back, I suppose, as I play more.

This morning I got up early (for me) and headed northwest an hour and a half to Goshen, where there’s an enclosed farmers market hosting Old Time jams second and fourth Saturdays.

Old Time isn’t my forte — mostly I tend to Celtic, classical, and some other stuff. And I’ve been to some Old Time jams where they seem to think it should feel Old and take a lot of Time going nowhere.

This one, on the other hand, was great fun.

There were two fiddles, two banjos (the kind that aren’t hurt-your-ears loud), two basses (one a washtub), two mandolins, a guitar, resonator mountain dulcimer (dulcibro), and two hammered dulcimers. A nice medium-sized group, good balance of instruments. And amazingly enough we were all reasonably in tune.

We played (not in any particular order, and I’m sure not a complete list):

Whiskey Before Breakfast
Angelina Baker
Old Joe Clark
June Apple
Liberty
Mississippi Sawyer
Southwind
Ashokan Farewell
Si Bheag Si Mhor
Fly Around My Pretty Little Miss
John Short’s Tune
Golden Slippers
Redwing
Soldier’s Joy

It took up five hours of my Saturday, what with travel and all, so it’s not something I’ll be doing twice a month, but it was well worth it today and I’m sure I’ll go back sometimes.

I also got to talk to a few folks about the dulcimer and exchanged info with the other player there. She told me about a music store that sells dulcimers and has a first and third Saturday jam, another twenty minutes away; probably the closest place to rent or buy a dulcimer, which is good info to have for potential students. I’ll have to go out to that jam sometime and see the store.

I am hoping, through things like this and through playing out wherever else I can, to make contact with the other area players, so as to get some students and maybe get a dulcimer jam going — I am especially hoping to find other folks closer to home.

Today Amy and I were playing in the music room. She is almost 15 months old.

First we played with my mountain dulcimer — made from a kit when I was a camp counselor; not very good, but good enough. She knows she is not allowed to touch the tuning pegs. What she likes to do is put her fingers or palms on the strings on the fretboard; she moves her hands around the fretboard, like I do, as if she, too, wants to make different notes on the melody string. Occasionally she tries to strum or pluck, and sometimes hurts her fingers. I showed her how to hold a pick to strum, and she thought that was pretty fun, too.

Then she picked up my soprano recorder (a plastic Yamaha; very nice but also nicely undelicate). Just put the mouthpiece in her mouth and blew, and was delighted to make a pretty sound.

She asked me to play my hammered dulcimer — at least that’s my interpretation of “pway” and pointing. Her attention span for it is very limited, though — maybe once or twice through one tune.

Her own musical toys include some homemade shakers (papier mache over toilet paper tubes and soapboxes), a combination xylophone / piano, a big jingle bell on a necklace, a cowbell from my brother’s trip to Switzerland, and a plastic drum with little beads inside.

I have not played my dulcimer regularly since a month or two before Amy was born last November. I have more or less kept it in tune, and I play a few minutes here and there most weeks.

I’ve found that there are a lot of things I don’t remember how to play, particularly classical stuff. So much comes back in the muscle, audio, and visual memory, but there are gaps.

Since I memorize, gaps mean I’ve got to go back into the sheet music, find the gaps, and learn what’s in them again. And it often means also finding where I’ve rewritten things in my memory and need to learn them again the correct way — at least where I care about there being a correct way or not, like in Bach.

Mark’s new job started last week, and we plan to give him a month or so to get settled into the new patterns and responsibilities before I go out for gigs and such.

But I have plenty of work to be doing just at home, relearning some things, reworking others, and refreshing my memory about more.

Today I took a half hour with a Handel bourree from Water Music — the one the Frugal Gourmet used for his soundtrack, but not at all that fast.

I’m actually sort of glad I’d forgotten so much of this one. Before, I played two voices simultaneously, but didn’t have a good sense of them as separate voices. Now I am working each one separately, keeping one to one hand and one to the other except for one pair of notes that works better switching hands.

I have a new mailing address:

PO Box 64
Plymouth, IN 46563