Fueling the Fire for a Slow-Cooked Song : Music Society Festival Seeks to Teach Traditional Techniques

Take half a dozen gourds and some bones. Add spoons, saws and a couple of pieces of garden hose. Interject rhythm. The result--given a dash of know-how--could be musical splendor.

This weekend, when 110 musicians gather for the 8th Annual Summer Solstice Dulcimer and Traditional Music & Dance Festival, there will be plenty of know-how. In fact, the major purpose of the three-day event at Cal State Northridge is to teach traditional music techniques.

“In our country, there’s fast-food--and there’s fast music. You can go to the store and pick up a book on how to play an instrument. Much of the skill, though, is not captured,” said Clark Weissman, president of the California Traditional Music Society, the educational nonprofit corporation that sponsors the annual festival.

“The intricacies and tradition of the music cannot be learned by simply reading a book. You have to be able to listen to the music--live.”

Weissman’s wife, Elaine, founded the music society and is its executive director. In 1980, she coordinated the first summer solstice event. She and her husband have organized the festival ever since, this year with the help of about 40 coordinators and more than 200 volunteers. They say they do it because they love folk music and are determined to keep it alive.

“The music is so exciting. I get chills listening to it,” Elaine said. “The sound is so different than what you hear every day. It’s thrilling.”

Clark Weissman describes this weekend’s event as “27 festivals in one.” “It’s similar to a three-ring circus, in the sense of having simultaneous events,” Weissman said. Different locations throughout the campus are dedicated to a certain type of music, and so-called “ringleaders” are in charge of each particular area.

More than 300 workshops will be offered on Saturday and Sunday, scheduled from 10 a.m. to 5:15 p.m. and covering beginning, intermediate and advanced music techniques. Participants are encouraged to bring audio tapes for recording and will be provided with specific course handouts.

For curious would-be musicians, there will be beginners’ workshops in autoharp and saw. Participants can learn how to play the instruments even if they have never had any previous musical experience. The instruments will be on loan, and two-hour “boot camps” will be conducted.

“We bring out all the closet musicians,” Weissman joked.

Advanced sawyers will have the opportunity to compete in the 2nd Annual International Musical “Saw-Off,” a competition coordinated by master sawyer Jim Leonard. This year’s contest judges will include master sawyers Moses Josiah from Guyana, South America, and David Weiss, first oboist of the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

An avid musical historian who has just completed writing a book on the history of the musical saw called “Scratch My Back,” Leonard said the instrument is a “completely American innovation.”

The saw appeared as a musical instrument in the early 1900s and was popularized in the 1920s by vaudevillians such as The Weaver Brothers and Elvira, and Clarence Mussehl and Marion Westpal. A Wisconsin-based company, started by Mussehl, continues to be the largest manufacturer of musical saws in the world.

“It’s the novelty of the saw--the fact that you can cut a log with it or build a house--that caught my interest and has kept it ever since,” Leonard said.

Another unusual instrument featured at the festival is the hurdy-gurdy, described by Weissman as “a derivative form of the violin but also a percussive instrument.” Following the French Revolution, the hurdy-gurdy “virtually disappeared from the musical scene,” he said.

“Those who played the instrument were killed off. It’s taken France 200 years to bring the instrument back.” The French band Lo Jai will demonstrate the hurdy-gurdy’s characteristic sound as part of a special Saturday Evening Concert beginning at 8 p.m.

Free Dance

The summer solstice festival begins Friday night with a free dance from 8 to 11:30 p.m. On Saturday and Sunday there are demonstrations of a variety of instruments, including banjos, concertinas, dulcimers, flutes, guitars, handbells, harps, mandolins, tin whistles and more. There will also be opportunities to learn different styles of playing bagpipes and fiddles, Weissman said.

Workshops on African drums, gospel songs and several dance styles, including Greek, Bulgarian and American square dancing, are among those that will have interpreters for the hearing impaired.

Continuous mini-concerts will be held both days in the courtyard area, and late-afternoon dance parties and a finale concert are scheduled.

What started out as a half-day event at Greystone Mansion in Beverly Hills has grown over the past eight years into a major production. The Weissmans expect 6,000 people to attend the event. Plans for next year’s festival are under way.

“We used to have to travel to Europe to find a festival like this,” said Elaine. “By doing this in our own back yard, we’re insuring the knowledge of these instructors will live on.”

“We’ve started with the best things from around the world and adapted them to the people of Los Angeles,” Clark said. “In our workshops you see an 85-year-old beside a 15-year-old. Where else can you see the old, middle-aged and young mix?”

Tickets for the festival are $16 per person per day for daytime events. Children 4 and younger are free. Tickets for Saturday night’s concert are $11. The campus is located at Nordhoff Street and Zelzah Avenue. For additional information call (818) 885-2251 or (818) 342-7664.