Bonnie Rideout highlights BreakFest benefit for St. Andrew's food program
It’s been about a year now since Bonnie Rideout, the critically hailed Celtic music fiddler from Saline, “got off the road.” That is, she quit her once-heavy touring schedule and began focusing on her upcoming album — which required that she master a unique, complex Scottish-music form, and compose new pieces for it.
Plus, she just grew weary of heavy touring after doing it for so many years. She’s now more interested in creating new music, and just doing individual shows here and there.
So, when she got the call from the organizers of Friday’s BreakFest 2010 show at The Ark — a benefit for Breakfast at St. Andrew’s, which has been serving breakfast to the homeless and needy for 27 years at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church — she didn’t hesitate.
Bonnie Rideout, pictured, joins Robert Jones, Duck Baker and Bill Bynum & Co. for BreakFest 2010 at The Ark.
Chris Moscatiello
“I always do a certain number of benefits a year, because I feel like music is something to give back to the communities,” says Rideout, who has mostly lived in the Washington, D.C. area since she graduated from the University of Michigan in 1985. “And this is a crucial cause. The program at St. Andrew’s definitely needs everyone’s support.”
Also performing at the BreakFest benefit are Detroit’s gospel-blues singer-guitarist Robert Jones, jazz-fingerstyle guitarist Duck Baker, and the Detroit-area country-bluegrass group Bill Bynum & Co.
Rideout says she definitely needed to get off the road to master the challenging Scottish piobaireachd form (pronounced PEE-bruck, with a “hard R” sound. And that’s the original Gaelic spelling — the Anglicized / American spelling is “pibroch.”) The form evolved out of the centuries-old classical music of the Highland bagpipes and the Celtic harp, or clarsach.
Pibroch is unique to Scotland, and the fiddle pibroch pieces from the early 18th century were the first written examples of the form. Pibroch expands the potential for the fiddle, says Rideout — employing re-tuned stings, double-stops, different bowing patterns and “complex ornamentation that’s similar to what’s used by pipers, and in Gaelic songs.”
Rideout first discovered pibroch in the 1986-’87, while living in Scotland for 2 years — specifically, at the Armdale Castle on the Isle of Skye. Listen to Bonnie Rideout "MaGrigor's Search" (MP3).
“Up until now, I’d included one pibroch piece on each of my albums — it was always the last track on the album — but I never really focused on it until the last couple of years,” says Rideout by phone from her home, near Alexandria, Virginia. “It was always in the back of my head to do an entire album devoted to it, but it takes a lot of focus and time, because it’s very technically challenging.
“So, I figured, I’m not getting any younger, and I have some arthritis in my hand, so if I was going to do it, I’d better do it now.” The resulting album, “Scotland’s Fiddle Piobaireachd, Vol. 1,” will be released in April. “And Volume 2 is almost finished,” she adds.
But before she could record, Rideout had to devote many hours to practicing, writing and rehearsing. “If I hadn’t studied classical violin at U of M, I wouldn’t be able to play pibroch,” says Rideout. “And I still had to become more proficient at it before I was ready to record the album, because it really was the classical music for the bagpipes, and was adapted for the fiddle. It consists of a theme, with variations, like classical music, and is very complicated, especially in terms of what you do with your left hand — but it’s still a traditional music form.”
But since so little of the original pieces were written down, Rideout composed new sections herself. And much of the music on the “Piobaireachd” album does indeed evoke aspects of classical music. Many of the sections have a reflective, mournful, pensive and / or melancholy quality, while others are more uptempo, energetic and intricate.
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Rideout played the viola on several the pieces, as opposed to her usual instrument, the fiddle. “I love the tone of the viola — those low tones,” says Rideout effusively. “The violin is pretty high, especially on the E string. So the viola is perfect for the pibroch, because it has such a wonderful resonance, especially when playing the drones.”
The project was also geographically ambitious: Rideout traveled to France, Scotland, Maine and the hills of Appalachia to record the pieces with the musicians she thought were best suited to the project — Allan MacDonald on Highland bagpipes and vocals, Simon O’Dwyer on Bronze Age horns, William Jackson on clarsach and Chris Norman on flute.
“And they don’t tour or travel much any more either,” says Rideout with a laugh. “So I had to go to where they were.”
Ultimately, the reason Rideout loves the pibroch form so much is that “it is extremely spiritual music — it’s almost meditative in a way, and it takes the listener on a journey, like they’re walking into a painting, with all of these incredible textures and images,” she describes. “It’s very transporting, on a level that is very different than the jigs and reels and strathspeys that I would play to get people up and dancing.
“Many of the pieces are laments for someone who is gone, like a soldier who died in battle, and some evolved out of the gathering of the clans for battle — but now are more about just gathering people together to lift up their spirits.
“And since it’s so spiritual, I don’t think I was mature enough 20 years ago to do this project — devoting this much time to pibroch, and delving into it so deeply. I think I needed to be middle-aged — to get a lot more life under my belt — before I was really ready to do this.”
Kevin Ransom is a free-lance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com. He can be reached at KevinRansom10@aol.com.