Lissa Schneckenburger (For Grada)

This week we hear from New England fiddler Lissa Schneckenburger. Lissa  has been performing and recording New England fiddle and folk music for the past 20 years. Her fiddling is one of a kind, intensely danceable, with virtuosic technique and fluidity. She shares what it was like to fiddle as a kid, traveling to fiddle contests in Maine, her experiences studying music at the New England Conservatory, and her latest projects to come out of the period of the pandemic.
Lissa Shneckenburger is well known for teaching adult fiddlers how to learn by ear, and she breaks down the different roadblocks her students run into when trying to get the hang of it.

We present the tune For Grada from Lissa's album Falling Forward.
Lissa's Website: https://lissafiddle.com/
Bandcamp: https://lissafiddle.bandcamp.com/
Mailing List: https://lissafiddle.com/contact/
Ear Training Course: https://lissafiddle.com/store/learning-by-ear-video-series/

Chapters

• 0:00 Lissa Schneckenberger's Journey Into Fiddle Music
• 10:34 Exploring Music Communities and Fiddle Education
• 26:17 The Story Behind the Tune "Grata"
• 30:27 Upcoming Workshops and Album Release

Transcript

Meg Wobus Beller: 0:00

Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of the tune For Grada by Lissa Schneckenburger from her album Falling Forward. Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking to fiddler and folk singer Lissa Schneckenburger.

Meg Wobus Beller: 0:27

Lissa grew up in Maine, played the fiddle and violin, I believe, from an early age, Studying through college, went to New England Conservatory I'm curious about that and has been a professional musician now in Vermont playing and doing all kinds of amazing things Traditional New England fiddle, writing music for fiddle and songs and performing really all over the world, and also has a wonderful online teaching fiddle presence that I'm sure we'll talk about. Lissa, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me Awesome. I like to start with kind of your story of how you got involved with the fiddle and with folk music, because not everyone who starts playing the violin dives into the fiddle part of it. So what was that like in Maine when you were a kid?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 1:26

Yeah, so when I was a kid I was really really interested in fiddle music, probably because I guess when I was five years old, some of our neighbors played. They were a little older than me and I just thought they were super cool kids. And one sister played the violin, one played the cello. So I started begging my mother for an instrument and she didn't quite believe me, that she didn't know if I was really serious, and so she kind of put it off and I think it's possible. My family was a little bit broke and so we. So she got me a recorder and was like here, play this, it's free, and if you practice every day then we'll get you a fiddle eventually. And so I actually did.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 2:07

I practiced, I played the recorder for a year and then when I was six, the summer that I was six, my mom's best friend from college is a fiddle player and she was up visiting our family for a week on vacation and that week we went to rent me a little fiddle and she gave me my first couple of lessons my mom's friend, Carol Thomas Downing, and I don't know. It was really fun. I was just. I remember the day we went to the rental place and got my fiddle. I was so excited about it and I really, really wanted to be the one to carry my fiddle out of the store into the car. I did not want anybody else to touch it. It was like it was a big deal. It was really fun. So that's how I got started with the instrument and pretty, pretty near the beginning, my mom and I were both super excited about fiddling specifically, and so we found a fiddle teacher from when I was pretty young.

Meg Wobus Beller: 3:04

Yeah, so were you studying both?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 3:06

Sort of. So I studied with Greg Boardman, who's still teaching in Maine. He he teaches in the school system now and when I was a kid we did private lessons and he would do we did some of the Suzuki books, but it wasn't super serious. I'm not, I'm not a classical musician at all. I just was super, super focused on fiddling and I kind of treated especially like I only did up to like book four and Suzuki and all of those. All of that repertoire is folk music generally, anyway, up until, like you get to the Vivaldi stuff and I just treated all the Suzuki tunes as if they were fiddle tunes. So I I'm not a great note reader and I just like listened to the recordings and like played the tunes and then and then every week Greg would also record a bunch of fiddle repertoire for me to learn and I had like this rotation of new tunes coming in every week all the time. That I was super excited about.

Meg Wobus Beller: 4:04

Wow, that's thank you. That's so cool to hear about. Did you connect with with other kids at all?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 4:12

Yeah, connection part. I think the social part is probably one of the big reasons that I was so focused on fiddle music, because there wasn't a community around classical music and I just wanted to be with friends. So as a young kid I was homeschooled and there was like a homeschool group that we went to with a couple of other musicians. We did lots of singing together at this group and lots of rounds and harmony singing and making up songs together and there was one other fiddler who was part of that group and we kind of influenced each other when we were little. And then once I started going to fiddle contests, there were a bunch of fiddle contests in Maine. When I was a kid Every single county fair would have a fiddle contest. That's not as much the case anymore but there was like it felt like there was one every weekend from like July through October and that was a really great way to meet people and I met so many people through that circuit and it was pretty generally not super competitive, it wasn't very stressful, it was usually pretty fun. You were usually like in the grandstand at the horse track and people would be standing around behind the stage playing tunes before it was their turn to go up on stage and you would show up and you'd be like, okay, who am I going to play with? Who's available to play guitar and who else? Like what are you playing? Okay, I'll play this jig instead and like everyone would sort of like I don't know, you just hang out until it was your time to go on stage. So that was one way I met other kids and I met Ed Howe, who's an amazing fiddle player. His family was also doing that same circuit. And then there was also the contraint scene.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 5:59

My fiddle teacher, Greg, was part of several dance bands and one of which was called the Maine Country Dance Orchestra. They would play once a month near where I lived in Bowdoinham, maine, and it was a very large loose band that was inspired by Dudley Loftman and the Canterbury Dance Orchestra and all of the hippie New England dance musicians. So we had our own little branch of that up in Bowdoin Maine and it was super loose, like you could just show up and play in the back of the stage and play along with everybody. Or you could dance or, you know, I was a kid, so you could also just like run around and play tag outside or play hide and seek or something, and so that was also super social. We met lots of families that way. A lot of the Maine Country Dance Orchestra musicians also had kids and we were all just kind of like going to dances and having a good time. So lots of music and lots of socializing through fiddle for sure.

Meg Wobus Beller: 7:02

Wow, I never knew that you did contests.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 7:06

Yeah, I don't tell people that much because I think in other parts of the country contests mean something different, like I have friends who do the say the Texas style fiddle competitions, and that's like that's next level.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 7:24

Yeah, it's very, very competitive, it's very strict and regimented and even like I did eventually do some Scottish competitions, like I did the I used to go to the Highland Games at Loon Mountain in New Hampshire and even the Scottish stuff those competitions were way more formal and made me incredibly anxious. It was like a very intense experience. It was like oh quiet and like the judges were very serious and like writing things, scribbling things furiously and you're like, and that was less social, it wasn't as much hanging out amongst the competitors, it was like everybody was just practicing by themselves beforehand. I did those because I love Scottish music, but I didn't find it as much of a social outlet. So that's, I think, what most people think of when they're like thinking of competition or like think of like all of the classical competitions, like they're very intense and more about technical proficiency and actually evaluating who's the best.

Meg Wobus Beller: 8:29

It's interesting to hear you talk about meeting so many people. I so I graduated college in 2003. And I think that was around when you're. I think the first city I got of yours was Fiddle and Piano. My dad plays piano and we play together, so we got that CD. We were like whoa, other people doing this because in Central New York there wasn't a community like that. But then I got your first CD, which was not just Fiddle and Piano and it had a whole bunch of you know who I now know are like amazing names and musicians. So I mean it's really kind of a who's who of New England musicians on that. That first CD Is it was it different game? So the the one with violin and piano is Phantom Power, Phantom Power. And then your first CD was different game where you sing the song. I remember I remember hearing it in the car. So you talk about connecting with kids. How did you get to connect with all of those amazing musicians and kind of make your first project?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 9:40

In the same way that I was just describing, like connecting through just lots of social events going to dances, going to concerts, going to festivals, going to fiddle camps.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 9:50

I got really excited about fiddle camps in high school and went to as many I just.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 9:56

I love traveling, I love music and I love meeting people.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 9:59

So I just did it as much as I possibly could and, as I said, I was homeschooled, or I went to public school for a little bit in the middle but then went back to homeschooling in high school because, primarily because I wanted to play music all the time and that allowed me to like I could work part time and then save money, so then I could go travel to fiddle camps and festivals and go as many places as possible where there was music happening, and so that's really a very vague answer of how I met everybody.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 10:34

It's just one of those things that I love about the music community is that it's this wide, wide, intricate network of friends and relationships and so, yeah, playing, you meet somebody at a fiddle camp and then they, then you decide to do a gig together and then they bring on new musicians to the gig and then you get to rehearse and work with these new people and then you have these new friendships and then then you get to do gigs with them, and then their friends, and then their friends, and then their friends.

Meg Wobus Beller: 11:03

That's how you know it's a whole networking thing, so homeschooling was kind of part of it.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 11:11

So I actually loved school when I was going. I went to public school for sixth through ninth grade and it was awesome. I loved it. It was really fun. Like I was super interested in pop culture. I wanted to know how everybody was dressing and what they were doing with their hair and I wanted to know the music that everybody was listening to and it was worth it for that. Like I got so excited about Nirvana came out. The first Nirvana album came out when I was in middle school. They might be giants and like all this fun music that I still love today and it was really fun. But then eventually I was like hang on, I really I'm spending a lot of time on the school bus. I just want to play fiddle, and so I yeah, I figured out something else.

Meg Wobus Beller: 11:54

So then what happened with the New England Conservatory? I didn't know that you could go there and study improv. So I was at Eastman and there was one guy who came for jazz on violin and then he left after a year. He was like this is BS, basically. And it was. And of course Berkeley didn't even start to like I don't know later in the aughts. So so what are you doing?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 12:20

Not very many people know this, so it's good to ask. New England Conservatory has multiple areas of study, areas of focus, and it was actually the first conservatory to start a jazz studies program. I don't remember the date, it might have been the late 60s, early 70s. There was the head of the school was Gunther Schuller, who is this very influential musician, both the classical and jazz worlds, and was kind of like a big band leader and he had this idea. He had this concept that there was classical music and then there was jazz, and then he had this idea of like a third stream which would combine the best elements of both classical and jazz and you would have say extended classical harmony with improvisation For example. And he started at the same time as he started the jazz studies program at NEC. He also started the third stream program and that went on, for you know, for many years.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 13:22

As time went on, other conservatories also started jazz programs. Berkeley School of Music started and then when I was getting into college they had changed the name because nobody ended up knowing what third stream meant. It was an idea that kind of started and ended with Gunther Schuller and no one was like what is, what is third stream, I don't even know. So they changed the department name to contemporary improvisation and it kind of became a catchall. It was really focused on learning by ear, super focused on developing a personal style through extensive study of a range of influences or musical heroes, and because of the focus on improvisation and because of the focus on oral learning, it ended up catching.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 14:13

Over the years it's caught a lot of fiddle and folk musicians, yeah, and also, you know also it's all kinds of instruments, all kinds of different people, though there'll be classical musicians in the department that want to learn how to improvise. There'll be jazz musicians in the department that want to learn how to compose more extended harmonies, plus all of the fiddle and folk world who just want to be able to study music in a context that makes sense to them and be able to be really focused and serious about it. It was a really, really good fit for me.

Meg Wobus Beller: 14:43

Wow, that's so cool. I can't believe I never heard about it.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 14:48

It's awesome. And then at the same time so I was there, I guess I started in 1997, maybe, yeah, 1997. And at the same time there was a blossoming I guess it was the blossoming string department at Berkeley College of Music. So I had a bunch of friends from fiddle camps who all moved to Boston at the same time. So I had a couple of friends going to Berkeley, I had a friend going to Harvard, I had a friend Like we were just like all in the area all of a sudden and we had this idea. We were like we loved each other from fiddle camp and we love jamming, and so here we are at college and it was just super, super exciting to have our college experiences, our college friends, and then to get together in the fiddle world and have jam sessions in the city. And we went out to pubs, we went to concerts, we had a jam on the steps of the Christian Science Center at one point where we're just like oh my god, this is so exciting.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 15:44

It's like fiddle camp all the time. It was a good time to be in Boston. I think it is always a good time to be in Boston if you're a fiddle player. There's a lot going on.

Meg Wobus Beller: 15:55

For sure. So I know that the tune today that we're going to do comes from an album. It's your most recent album, right, and it's all female musicians, which I love. Yeah, I don't know. Do you want to just share what that album came out of?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 16:12

Yeah yeah. So my latest album is called Falling Forward. It's almost all original fiddle tunes. I included two traditional songs on there just because I do love doing that too, but it's mostly original tunes, and I was writing a lot of music the first year and a half of the pandemic. I just I guess it was my reaction to all the stress what a weird, insane, crazy time period for everybody, and I was very privileged. I had a home and a family and we were all there stuck together all the time, and so I did start writing tons of music. I was writing just oodles of tunes and also songs, and I wrote so much repertoire that I ended up with enough material for several albums, and the fiddle album just happens to be the first one I put together.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 17:16

I'm also simultaneously working on an original song album. That's been a slower process because I'm doing it Each track is with a different producer and so it's taking a little bit longer because each track requires a little bit more organization and research and I start. It's really cool. It's a really fun way to get kind of a buffet experience, getting to try out working with all these different people that I've always wanted to work with, but it's been taking a little bit longer. It'll be out soon, I hope, but in the meantime, yes, this fiddle album was really fun to work on.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 17:55

I invited my friend, Katie McNally to produce it. She's an amazing fiddle player who lives up in Portland, maine, and she's a wonderful Scottish and Cape Breton style fiddler and she's just also a great human. It was an awesome fit. I just loved working with her and she had great ideas for the music. She was super organized, really calm in the studio. It felt really wonderful to be supported in that way and just be able to be creative and focus on fiddling and playing well, and we hired some awesome other musicians. I'm really excited about it.

Meg Wobus Beller: 18:35

What's the best place to go online to hear the album?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 18:39

Folks can find everything, including this new album, at lissafiddle. com. So I have all kinds of goodies at lissafiddle. com, including videos, and people can purchase my new album. I have LPs. I want to stay trendy. Lps are back in fashion. I actually manufactured LPs this time for the new fiddle album if there's any audio file fiddlers out there and there's a bunch of other stuff too For musicians that are listening. I have a free five day practice challenge that you can sign up on through my website, and I have a learning by ear video course that people can check out, plus tons of just fun music videos and lots of albums. So all of that fun stuff is at lissafiddle. com.

Meg Wobus Beller: 19:32

There's a ton of stuff there. I was looking around while I was getting ready for the podcast, since I teach fiddle and you teach fiddle folks. I met Lyssa a year ago at Fiddle Hell and the thing that really blew me away about your teaching was that you know, people teach by ear a lot in the folk music world and a lot of times it's like here's what the tune sounds like, here's the first chunk. And I can get frustrated with that because people need to hear a tune so many times. And I remember you were just like, should we just play this tune a lot? And then you played me music or a strict.

Meg Wobus Beller: 20:10

But you just played it and played it like slow and faster and it was like eight or ten times and you kind of stopped in the middle like, is this okay? Everyone was like yes, thank you, this is what we've wanted, this is what we've been craving, just to keep doing it over and over. So I just thought you were kind of a genius about playing by ear and and then now I know that you like studied it I mean like a servant or even doing it your whole life. What is your? Just a podcast today about playing by ear. Some people are so intimidated by it, so can you just give us a little bit about it?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 20:47

Oh boy, oh, it's a big take. I have a lot to say. So, yeah, so learning by ear it can be very intimidating. It was not that way for me. I had the opposite experience, where I learned I have a more natural ability to learn by ear. It's a preference, and I find it extremely challenging to read music. I'm not a natural sight reader. In fact, I pretended to read music my entire life until I got to conservatory and then had to like pass a site reading class my first semester and was just like oh my god.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 21:23

So, like I very I was in a lot of yeah, anyway, it was. It was, it was stressful, I did pass, but what it meant was I have, I have this experience of being really terrible at something and having to learn how to do it anyway. And I have this, I guess, proof that even if you're not naturally gifted at something, you can learn how to do it and there are steps that will help, there are exercises that you can do and daily practice is necessary. It really really helps. And so I've taken that my my own experience and kind of brought that into a lot of my teaching around learning by ear, because some folks have that experience with with oral learning, and they might be really really fast at learning from the page but not quite know what's going on when they're just hearing something. So I feel like every individual is different and even within the scope of, let's say, you have 10 people who say I just can't learn by ear, it's impossible, I can't do it. Amongst those 10 people, each of them may have a slightly different learning style and a slightly different reason that they're getting stuck, and I just find that so fascinating. It's really interesting and I just enjoy Finding out about people and learning how each brain works and learning about each learning style.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 22:52

So, for example, somebody might be getting hung up because they're not able to hear what is happening, like it might actually just be a hearing issue, right. Maybe it means like they need to use earbuds when they're listening to music, or they need to turn the volume up really loud, or they need to go to the doctor and get their ears checked. Like there's like legitimate hearing Possible issue, right. And then there's someone else might say, okay, I can hear it, but I'm having a hard time remembering it. I can't contain it in my mind, like I hear it and then it's gone and I don't know how to keep it right. So that's more of a memory retention Thing, which would require specific memory exercises, right, to build up your short and long term memory, whereas someone else might say I can hear it, I can remember it, but I am having the worst time, like figuring out what it means, right. So that's like a translation to your instrument Issue. So that means learning some more technical exercises, figuring out where typical intervals sit on your instrument, or just doing a lot of practicing where you have to duplicate things on your instrument over and, over and over again and then it can go on from there.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 24:02

Like, each person has like a slightly different little thing like, or another common thing is people say I can't do this, and it's actually just a confidence issue, where they actually probably are doing it fine and they just don't believe in themselves yet. And so there's lots of folks that will say I can't do XYZ. And then it turns out that they, that they just have very high expectations and that, especially especially with adult learners, adults are really interesting because they tend to have many things that they already do really well. Like you know, being an adult requires everyone listening to this knows how to dress themselves very well and they know how to tie their shoes and they know how to brush their teeth, like all these things that you're just like I can just do that. I don't think about it, I just do it. I totally rock it getting dressed in the morning.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 24:55

But if you were a kid, you would get a lot of positive affirmation If you were learning to do one of those things and you would get a lot of support around those things, and it might have taken you a long time to originally learn to tie your shoes and adults forget that, they blank it out. And so if you're at that, tying your shoes part of learning by ear, right where you're just having to break it down into tiny steps and learn and practice and then relearn and keep practicing and adults can get down on themselves where they're like why don't I do this? I need to do this already, why don't I have it? Why aren't? Why aren't I awesome at this? I'm awesome at everything else. So I think confidence can be another stumbling block for, or expectations right, people are like forget. If you're like a six year old on the fiddle, you could be a 55 year old, but musically you're six. People forget to appreciate themselves musically as a six year old.

Meg Wobus Beller: 25:55

Folks, you can tell that Lisa has thought about this so much. If you have any interest in hearing more about this, getting the exercises, you should definitely sign up for the workshop. Go to Lissa fiddlecom. Look for the playing by ear workshop Before we go. Do you want to just quick tell us about the tune that we're sharing? It's called grata. It's a for grata. It's a real in E flat and yeah, but when did you write this? What was this tune?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 26:32

Okay, I wrote this a long time ago. There's a couple, there's two little pieces of this. First of all, I was at the time I was going through this exercise, a daily practice routine for myself, or I would just. I was going around the circle of fifths, one key per day, and I would do an extended scale warm up and then like a little exercise in that key and then I would write a new tune every single day in that key. So I like I, just I did it. I went around the circle of fifths major and minor and I did it and some of the tunes are terrible, but it was a really good way. It was just a routine I needed at that time in my practice routine. I needed a regular routine and it was providing that structure for me, and I actually ended up writing several tunes in E flat that I really loved.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 27:18

This one was written for the band grata, the Irish band, because they're wonderful, sweet people, I love their music. When they were touring more extensively think I don't even know how I met them. We probably met at a festival or a conference or something, and then we stayed in touch as we were traveling around on tour. At one point when I was living in Brooklyn. This was years ago. Grada was on tour, they were playing in New York and then they had a night off and they were just like bumming around Manhattan. My boyfriend at the time had a gig that night and I was at that gig in Brooklyn. It was his birthday and so grata decided for his birthday they were going to commandeer a limo and convince this limo driver to drive to Brooklyn and pick us up at the end of the gig and just take us out on the town. And it was amazing because they did it. I don't even think they I'm not even sure if they actually paid for the limo. They like they were walking around outside, outside of a club in Manhattan where there's like a bunch of limos just parked there waiting for people to come out of the club. They just sweet talked some guy who was just standing around. They were like listen, you're not doing anything, let's go to Brooklyn, let's hang out. They like convinced him to throw in a bottle of champagne. It was amazing. And so they showed up in a limo as my boyfriend's gig was just finishing up and they were like hey, it's your birthday, getting the limo, let's go. And we actually, because it was the end of a gig, all of a sudden the band that had just been playing, like they all, piled into the limo. We had a huge array of instruments. We have the double bass in the limo, we have the champagne going and we like totally just went for a limo ride. It was really, really fun. I think that might, it's possible that's actually my only limo ride of my life, but it was like a commandeered, unplanned surprise birthday limo. It was really fun.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 29:18

So I wrote the tune as a thank you. So I wrote this tune to thank the band for being so fun and so sweet and, and just for you know, thank you for their friendship. And I kind of was hoping that the flute, like that the whistle player, would get into playing it on the b flat whistle. He never did, but I'm still hoping maybe it's not over he could still learn it. It's, it is a bit of a, it's a bit of a beast on the fiddle. I still really enjoy the tune and I really enjoyed making the music video for it which just came out this past spring. We did all this beautiful footage of the area where I live in southern Vermont, which is, it's so pretty, just to accompany the track, to accompany the music. We have gorgeous footage of waterfalls and mountains and lakes it's just and woods. It's like very southern Vermont. I hope people will go check that out and find it and either enjoy the tune or even maybe attempt to learn it.

Meg Wobus Beller: 30:20

Yeah, yeah, she pairs it with a, with an E flat jig, which I just I love, I love. When you play with piano and accordion, you can play in all the fun keys.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 30:33

I believe that the keys are for everyone.

Meg Wobus Beller: 30:37

Absolutely Well listen, it has been so fun to have you here and to hear you talk about all these things. I know there's so many more things we could talk about, but do you have anything coming up in? I guess it's December that you want to let people know about?

Lissa Schneckenburger: 30:54

Yes, it's December. Best thing to do is to go to list of fiddle calm and check my tour schedule, which is what I do when I'm trying to figure out where I'm supposed to be. I know I'm going to have some workshops coming up. Obviously, there's the learning by your video course, which is just videos. You can take it at any time, but I've started doing some live zoom workshops where people that have already taken the course and want more like if they want more support or more help with some of the exercises or they want like the next level up for your training I've started doing some live workshops on zoom every month for that, so people can find that on my website and eventually I'll have a new album out, so people should definitely sign up for my mailing list to find out about that.

Meg Wobus Beller: 31:39

And we should have in the show notes link to the mailing list and practice challenge and especially all this playing by ear, workshop and opportunities. Thank you again.

Lissa Schneckenburger: 31:51

It's great to have you. Thank you so much for having me.