DuoDuo, a trad folk supergroup which marries the Celtic cello and Québécois guitar of Natalie Haas and Yann Falquet to the Scottish harp and percussive dance of Maeve Gilchrist and Nic Gareiss, will bring an unforgettable night of music, dance, and song to the Abbey Bar above the Appalachian Brewing Company in Harrisburg on Sunday, June 2nd at 7:30 pm. The concert is sponsored by the Susquehanna Folk Music Society. More information can be found on the Susquehanna Folk Music Society website. Tickets are $24 General Admission, $20 for SFMS Members, and $10 for students (ages 3-22). Tickets will be available at the door or online.
Earlier this week, Natalie chatted with SFMS staff writer Peter Winter via email about the origins of DuoDuo, coming up with the group’s repertoire, and the key to a good musical duo.
_______________________________________________________
Ina word, how would you describe your experience playing with DuoDuo?
This band is so fun! I feel very lucky to get to be a part of a group of such masters and innovators on their respective instruments…and we’re very good friends too, which always helps! This is our 3rd ever tour together — with all of our individual projects taking up most of our time, this is a very special collaboration that only happens once a year.
I love how you talk about in the promo video how this group utilizes instruments that don’t always get to take the lead role in traditional music. Were there any challenges coming up with your arrangements?
Yes, absolutely…all of us are used to working in collaborations with fiddle players, so this is a very different spin on things to have these instruments that are typically used for back up taking more of a melodic role. It’s been quite a challenge to figure out textures that will best bring out our respective instruments’ potential, but it’s been a very fun one to navigate.
We have spoken in a previous interview about how you and Yann met and began working together, and the website talks about how Maeve & Nic met at the Shasta Fiddle Summit in Northern California, but how did these two duos finally come together?
We were all teaching at the Boxwood music camp in Nova Scotia a few summers ago, and each duo was performing on the same night…we thought it would be fun to try a collaboration as a quartet, and it went so well that we decided we wanted to be a band!
What are different musical traditions that the 4 of you draw from in the repertoire?
Yann brings us beautiful Quebecois songs and tunes from his homeland, Nic is very well versed in old-time Southern Appalachian music (amongst many other things), Maeve brings her Scottish/Irish influences along with her own delightful compositions, and I’m interested in Scandinavian music along with the Celtic melodies I’ve grown up with. It’s a very rich palette, which is greatly enlarged by the musical landscape of our own minds – we do a lot of our own compositions as well.
I saw in your promo video one component of the show is to break the group down into different combinations, creating OTHER duos. How did the 4 of you come up with that concept?
I think it sprang up naturally! Maeve and I had done some duo stuff in the past in another context and thought it would be fun to have another outlet for it…cello/harp is a great combo! The boys do a duo as well that utilizes the button accordion, playfully interweaving with Nic’s footwork. We want the show to be as much of a visual and sonic feast as possible!
So much of your career has been forged around the duo setting. You’re perhaps best known for your years long ongoing collaboration with Alasdair Fraser. What are some things you’ve learned musically from playing in duos all these years?
How to be a good musical conversationalist! There is so much room in that setting to be very in tune with someone else’s phrasing because there is nothing else to distract you — you can have these very intense musical conversations that way. There’s also a huge scope of possibility to fill, which is very liberating. I’m enjoying trying the quartet thing for now though…it’s very different but rewarding in different ways!
___________________________________________________
Peter Winter lives in Harrisburg where he writes, teaches music, plays in the Celtic group Seasons, DJs, runs half of the record label His & Hers Records and serves on the board of the SFMS. He is on instagram