Kitchen Céilí and Friends: Traditional and Original Music from Ireland, North America, the British Isles, and India
Sunday, February 23, 2025 at 3:00pm
Crowell Concert Hall
Free and open to the public
Wesleyan students, faculty, and staff can RSVP on WesNest, but reservations are not required.
Formed in 1993, the core group of Kitchen Céilí includes Banjo/Mandolin/North Indian Vocal/Guitar Instructor Stan Scott PhD ’97; Dorothea Hast PhD ’94 on vocals, tin whistle and recorders; Sam Scheer on vocals, guitar and banjo; and George Wilson on vocals and fiddle. The songs and instrumental pieces in this concert were gathered over the course of some four decades of study, travel, composing, and collaborating in Ireland, England, India, and at home in New England. The repertoire includes driving reels, slow airs, and traditional and contemporary songs of lovers and laborers from the mountains of Donegal to the rivers of West Bengal.
Profiles
Stan Scott teaches music at Wesleyan University, Southern Connecticut State University and his own Rangila School of Music in Middletown. He completed his PhD in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan in 1997 with a focus on North Indian classical vocal music. Scott’s recordings include Somewhere in the Middle of Your Life with Sam Scheer, The Lotus and the Rose, The Weaver’s Song: Bhajans of North India, A Friend of the Wind with Scheer, and Trillium E with John Spencer Camp Professor of Music Emeritus Anthony Braxton. Scott’s publications include Music in Ireland with Dorothea Hast (Oxford University Press), and Exploring the World of Music with Hast and James Cowdery (Kendall Hunt).
Dorothea (Dora) Hast completed her PhD in Ethnomusicology at Wesleyan in 1994 and has an impressive collection of traditional whistle tunes gathered in many field trips to Ireland. She co-authored Music in Ireland and Exploring the World of Music, and is currently a Visiting Scholar in Residence in the Music Department and Center for Caribbean Studies at Trinity College. Her latest project in collaboration with Stan Scott is on the Gombey drum and dance tradition in Bermuda.
Sam Scheer’s songwriting grows out of deep and extended immersion in American, Irish, and English poetry, folk, country, and theater music. He has collaborated with Stan Scott in recording and performing projects since the mid-1970s at Bennington College. Scheer currently teaches poetry at Drexel University, and commutes between his homes in New York City and Northampton, Massachusetts.
George Wilson, one of the most in-demand contra dance fiddlers in North America, is steeped in the folk music of his native upstate New York, as well as tunes from the Québécois, Cape Breton, Scottish, and Irish traditions. In addition to performing, he leads a large fiddle orchestra in Albany and has made three solo recordings, including Northern Melodies from New England, Quebec, Cape Breton, Scotland, Ireland, and Shetland.