Feature Friday GFS Exclusive Q&A with Holiday Pops Guest Artist: Fiddler, Liz Knowles!
Liz Knowles Biography:
Liz Knowles’ fascination with music has always been rooted in how one can arrive, land, and leave a note. Liz’s early foundations in classical music and many years of freelancing in New York City prepared her to work with a variety of artists outside of traditional music, including Marcus Roberts, The Bang-on-a-Can Orchestra, Bobby McFerrin, Paula Cole, Steve Reich, Eliot Goldenthal, Rachel Barton, and Don Henley. Liz has established herself as a dynamic performer and recording artist in Irish traditional music as a fiddler for Riverdance, Cherish the Ladies, The String Sisters, and The Martin Hayes Quartet, and with her trio of over twenty years, Open the Door for Three. She was featured as a soloist on the film soundtrack for “Michael Collins”, performed on Broadway with “The Pirate Queen”, and has been a featured soloist with many orchestras across America, including The New York Pops at Carnegie Hall and the National Symphony at the Kennedy Center. She was the music director and producer for several international stage shows and recording projects. As a composer and arranger, she has written several orchestral arrangements and been commissioned for pieces by such institutions and festivals as the Art Institute of Chicago, University of Notre Dame, University of Toronto, and the Rockport Celtic Festival. Teaching has been an integral part of her musical life- workshops and camps both in the US and abroad, as well as her own online teaching–and she currently teaches at the New England Conservatory. In her spare time, she writes a bi-monthly newsletter, LizNotes, and produces a podcast with fiddler Liz Carroll called The Lizzes.
GFS: When and how did you know the fiddle was the instrument for you?
LK: I played the piano informally as a small child but began the violin at age 7 because my grandmother (who raised me) saw a performance of a group of Suzuki students from Japan. It was in college that I began to truly love practicing and but it was the discovery of Irish music that gave me an authentic and honest voice on the instrument.
GFS: What makes Celtic Music so special?
LK: Irish music is special to me for many reasons. I was first drawn to its melodies and rhythms. The melodies of Irish music are all relatively simple and memorable, composed in modal keys, often sitting somewhere between major and minor, which can give them a haunting or sentimental flavor. There is also a meditative quality. Many of these tunes are dance tunes, and so they are generally played many times around before switching to another tune. We get to sit in a tune and explore it, and then move on when the mood feels right. There is a deeply rooted pulse underlying these dance tunes that is evident regardless of the presence of dancers, and this creates a kind of hypnotic experience of the music. Secondly, this music is a living tradition, one that stretches backwards into the past, is alive today and changing before our very eyes, and will exist in the future, alive for generations beyond our own. The tunes and songs have a rich history embedded in them, rooted in a place and time, and rooted in people, the person that composed it and those that have carried it over the generations by playing it again and again– a rich history that imprints on the tune, giving it its own unique story.
GFS: You are a female musician, producer, composer, and educator. What do you value most about these creative processes, and how much have females evolved in this field since you started?
LK: As a musician, I value the constant journey through technique, skill, and musicality, and I adore the opportunity to share what I have learned and loved in music through collaboration, performance, and recording. Producing (in recording and theatrical productions) has given me the great opportunity to shape music in larger and more expansive ways. It brings together all of my skills as a performer, a composer, and an educator. Composition has served me in two ways. First, composing music in the style of Irish music has helped to understand the music in deeper ways. Secondly, it has served as a bridge between my former life as a classical musician and my current life as a traditional musician, allowing me to exist both stylistically and in performance in both worlds at the same time. Teaching and being an educator has been the gift that keeps giving– it is the ever-present reminder that while each of us is on our own path, we still need each other along the way. In each of these areas, I value learning and the fact that I will never be “done” with music. It is the balance of deepening my knowledge of traditional music, sharing that knowledge, and continuing to develop my own style and individuality within the tradition that keeps me going in life and in music.
Women in the not-so-long-ago past certainly were not at the forefront of the public face of Irish music, but that does not mean that they were not there. It was at one of the first concerts I attended of Irish music that I was struck by the sounds of a female fiddler and the strength and power of her rhythm and sound. At the time, I thought it was the music that bowled me over. I simply hadn’t witnessed that kind of stage presence, that raw power in the playing, and the strength of the melodies in any other kind of music. I look back now and realize that, indeed, fewer women were playing this music in public, and how important it was that I saw that woman making those sounds. While knowing that the music business has been and can be full of male-dominated roles, particularly roles in production, luckily, I have felt very few barriers to the various aspirations I have had in music.
GFS: You have performed with the New York Pops and the Cincinnati Pops. What makes the fiddle and orchestra such an exciting pairing?
LK: Irish music, in its most traditional form, is a solo musician or a small group of musicians playing only the melody. Irish music has been described as having a “lonesome” quality. Accompaniment is a relatively new addition to music as we see the piano arrive in the tradition in the late 19th century and guitars and bouzoukis, and the like arriving in the 1960s. The modal quality, the rhythm, and the repetitive nature of the structure of this music invite and indeed can sustain a chordal structure, harmonies, and other instrumental sounds and textures. For me, the pairing of this lonesome quality with the sounds and textures of an orchestra– a palette that can range from the ethereal to the raucous– is quite stunning. It celebrates the music in big and boisterous ways.
GFS: Please share with us your connection with GFS Music Director Charles Peltz, and what you are looking forward to most about collaborating with him.
LK: I met Mr. Peltz when I joined the faculty at the New England Conservatory. Presenting and teaching Irish music at the college level is a relatively new occurrence in this country, and so my first year there, I very much felt on the periphery. Charles was quick to engage and clearly had some understanding and interest in this music, and he has always made me feel very welcome. I am very much looking forward to seeing and hearing his interpretation of the compositions and arrangements I have brought and the other repertoire he has suggested for this concert. His knowledge and openness to all styles of music go without saying, and this will be our first time performing together–that is reason enough to be excited!
GFS: What can our patrons look forward to most from this year’s Celtic Holiday performance?
LK: For me, Irish music expresses so fully the wide range of human emotion and experience–grief and loss, immigration and emigration, landscape and the rootedness of place, the quiet of rural living to the raucousness of city life, joyous gatherings, dancing, exhilaration and exuberance, and the full range of the joys and sorrows of work and family life. The holidays are a time to reflect on life and to be grateful for all that we have, so I hope that this concert will bring about that reflection and gratefulness through a wide range of Irish-flavored colors, melodies, and harmonies.
To learn more about Liz Knowles, visit her website: www.lizknowles.com
Sign up for LizNotes, a bi-monthly newsletter addressing the in-between, music, art, and life!
Check out other online resources:
Open the Door for Three . String Sisters . Martin Hayes Quartet . STAC
Holiday Pops: Celtic Holiday is SOLD OUT. No additional tickets will be sold at the door.
Thank you for your understanding. We look forward to having you in the hall with us again soon.
For more information on the Glens Falls Symphony, visit our website: www.theglensfallssymphony.org