http://timeriksenmusic.com/

If you stay tuned after the song you'll get to see insectivorous plants and an indigo bunting. Also, a spot where the blueberries are ripe way before they're supposed to be. Does anyone else know a place in Hampshire county where you can pick blueberries in the middle of June? Very strange to be picking blueberries when the laurels are in full bloom.
I set a new personal record for tick-having that day too: twenty nine! Can you beat that? I should do one of those contest things.
I've been working to develop a bajo sexto technique for accompanying these kinds of songs for the past five years or so, and am getting to be pretty happy with the results. Recently I've been writing more songs on it than playing old ones. Maybe I'll make another record of my own songs one of these days. Kind of like that guy, what's his name- the one with the guitar.

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http://timeriksenmusic.com/
By request.
There's a better quality version and some notes on my facebook page.

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http://timeriksenmusic.com/

A New England version of an old Irish song. I've known it for a long time but never felt natural singing it until after I hung out with Rosie Stewart in Belfast in 2005.

I was artist in residence at the Open House Festival, and was there for so long I started to feel like I should get a job at the chip shop across from the hotel. Instead I became a kind of de facto festival staff member.

One of my little jobs was picking Rosie up at the bus station, taking her for dinner at Burger King and helping her out with a workshop. She's a fabulous singer but I think it was more hanging out that little bit that made it possible for me to sing this stuff better. I don't know why though. I asked her if I could buy a CD but she said she didn't think she had any copies left but in any case hadn't brought any to the festival, which reminded me of a lot of my other favorite musicians.

The day this was filmed we had the longest sun shower I can remember- must have been half an hour straight of sunny rain that never turned into a downpour. Plum brook has the biggest bull frog tadpoles I've ever seen.

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Rosie Stewart on singing styles, from 10 mBliana ag Ceol, 2007 - 131491 www.tg4.ie

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Behold The Earth, a feature documentary directed by David Conover, is an inquiry into America's divorce from nature and the relationship between science and religion. www.beholdtheearth.com

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Listen to the entire interview here.
http://www.wnyc.org/shows/soun dcheck/episodes/2009/04/09/seg ments/128233
Three-time Grammy-nominated Cuban composer and pianist Omar Sosa has long been influenced by his African roots. On his latest album, Across the Divide, he explores how popular music was shaped by the tunes that entered two ports during the slavery years: Havana and Chesapeake Bay. He talks to WNYC's Soundcheck host, John Schaefer, about it and plays live in the studio.

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http://timeriksenmusic.com/

Tim Eriksen sings "Amazing Grace" Western Mass. style- for Wendy and Avery M. by request.

The tune, "Fiducia," is the one most often used for this hymn in the old New England tunebooks ("American Vocalist," "The Revivalist" and scores of others).

www.timeriksen.net
www.myspace.com/timeriksenmusi c

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http://timeriksenmusic.com/
Tim Eriksen sings a favorite song of Amelia Clarke, 1850-1944, on the Emily Dickinson trail in Amherst, MA.

www.timeriksen.net
http://www.myspace.com/timerik senmusic


"O thou who dries't the mourner's tear
how dark this world would be
if pierced by sin and sorrow here
we could not fly to thee

the friends who in our sunshine live
when winter comes are flown
and he who has but tears to give
must weep those tears alone

o who could bear life's stormy doom
did not thy wing of love
come brightly wafting through the gloom
our peace branch from above

then sorrow touched by thee grows bright with more than rapture's ray,
as darkness shows us worlds of light
we never saw by day." Thomas Moore

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www.timeriksen.net
It's sugar season! I love the sound of the sap buckets at this time of year, and unintentionally took their lead for the rhythm here. One time when I was touring in England someone told me the tune is also used for Morris dancing and was the first tune taken down by folklorist Cecil Sharp. It also appears as a hymn tune in various shape note books, though I first noticed it in a 19th c. Boston fiddle primer I found in a junk shop many years ago.

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http://timeriksenmusic.com/
http://www.new.facebook.com/pa ges/Tim-Eriksen/27966272629

There's another shorter version on my facebook page. There are apparently various theories about the tune name. I don't know what the deal is, but it's a great tune. I remember well being freaked out in kindergarten when a counselor of some kind took us one by one into the other room and asked us to sing Yankee Doodle and play with blocks. I guess it was a diagnostic thing of some kind. It's a bit of a red herring and you may find it hard to believe, but I've met two bilingual children in different decades who got a note home suggesting they may need to be put on ritalin because they didn't know the English word "spatula."

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www.fasola.org
www.festiwal.jaroslaw.pl/
http://timeriksenmusic.com/

I recently led a Sacred Harp singing school in Jaroslaw, Poland as part of the festival Piesn Naszych Korzeni ("song of our roots"). With the help of Jesse Pearlman Karlsberg and Magdalena Zapedowska, around 60 of us met twice a day for six days, with a final presentation/singing as our last meeting, from which this video is drawn. I loved meeting and singing with all these great people. There's talk of an all day singing next year, and there's already a movement afoot to start a regular singing in Warsaw. There are currently 16 Sacred Harp books in the country that I know of, with another 7 on the way. It's a start anyway.

The festival is one of the best I've ever been to. I even felt inspired to record two CDs while I was there. One will be a live CD from a beautiful Radio Dwojka recording of a concert I did at a candle lit church near the abbey where we were staying. The other is straight unaccompanied solo singing recorded in about an hour in one of the turrets on the abbey wall. This will probably be the first of a slew of Northern Roots music recordings.

One of the most amazing things in Jaroslaw is a little bakery that's only open when they have hot buns- custard, buckwheat (fabulous), poppy seed, blueberry, apple, onion and several others including my clear favorite (featured in the video): the rose petal jam bun. They're kind of hard to explain, but I love them dearly. In my youtube favorites there's an excellent video of Harry Partch making rose petal jam and saying hilarious true things about journalism.

I flew home on August 24 and started graduate school on the 25th.

Here's another view of the same singing:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v =CKuUikU2jBE

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www.timeriksen.net
I wrote this 23 years ago almost to the day. It was one of the last songs I wrote before deciding that I needed to build a deeper musical foundation and get a handle on what I was talking about before writing more. I'd only been studying Carnatic music for a year or so, and was only toying with shape-note music (looking through books, listening to the occasional recording). This song keeps coming back to me though. Initially it was one of many incongruous moments in "Stands for Nothing's" nominally hardcore punk sets, with Max Bovine on bass and brother Benny on drums (I think he was a whopping 12 years old by that time). It had a brief incarnation as a Cordelia's Dad song ca. 1994, and we even recorded it at some point, but it didn't really suit the band. The sound of cicadas is one of the most potent I know. October in New England is somehow easier to deal with than August.
I'm home for a couple days before heading to the Jaroslav Sacred Music Festival in southeastern Poland. I'll probably post something from there next.

P.s. someone asked for lyrics:

"Window- why now is the moon not the color of blood- not the color of blood but of moth wings?
I remember the dusty sound of Autumn insects at my screen scratching to come in. Window...
In December the snow knocks the sound from the air, and like mulch it lies. Through it I smell the last October cricket fermenting into the Spring.
Why now is the moon not the color of dust but of embers? And why now in August does music mean nothing, when buried in insects I sing along with them, every one of us alone?
Window...."

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http://timeriksenmusic.com/

Tim Eriksen sings "Amazing Grace" Western Mass. style- for Wendy and Avery M. by request.

The tune, "Fiducia," is the one most often used for this hymn in the old New England tunebooks ("American Vocalist," "The Revivalist" and scores of others).

www.timeriksen.net
www.myspace.com/timeriksenmusi c

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www.timeriksenmusic.com
http://www.new.facebook.com/pa ges/Tim-Eriksen/27966272629
www.timeriksenmusic.com

Another from Evan Chambers' incredible symphonic settings of New Hampshire gravestone texts "The Old Burying Ground." This CD should sell a billion copies- we'll see...

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A brief clip from the movie, "Cold Mountain" ... just the boys, singin' the song, out in the woods.

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