Enjoyed our Yuletide session yesterday (yes, two in two days!) – lots of tunes played, songs sung, food eaten, drink drunk etc. At the end I got a rather nice present – Les gave me a double LP (yes! – vinyl!) that’s an anthology of Swedish fiddle music. Mostly players of “violins”, the occasional “wooden shoe fiddle”, but the are several tracks with a certain Eric Sahlström playing “key fiddle”. It’s nicely organised by region (Dalarna, Uppland, Skåne and so on) as well. This is a real treat – many thanks Les. I’m really looking forward to listening to it; it dates from 1979. My nyckelharpa friends will be jealous 😉

LP cover

 

Thanks to Anne, Dennis and family for today’s session. Here’s a good combination – nyckelharpa and Steven’s erhu. We even found a tune or two that they sounded good together with. The nyckelharpa played some stuff it wasn’t at all used to 🙂

two musicians

 

Great to see live coverage of the Soyuz launch on terrestrial TV this morning; I have just watched the docking to the International Space Station live on Nasa TV – here’s a screen grab of the Soyuz craft (three astronauts on board!) taken on the first automated approach which had to be abandoned – the Soyuz craft was then docked manually. When I was young I found space exploration inspired me so much to go into science; I hope this does the same for youngsters today, with Tim Peake visiting the ISS. If we want to continue to move forward with science and technology, we must keep exploring at the frontier. Without this, we wouldn’t have our mobile phones, computers, Facebook and so on today. More and better science education please!

screen grab

The photo is a screen grab from NASA TV during the docking process.

A link to Eilidh Steel’s Facebook post with a nice photo of the class:

Well done to my Scots Music Group fiddle class for playing so well at their end of term stramash last night!Check out the website if you are interested in learning an instrument in 2016: www.scotsmusic.org

Posted by Eilidh Steel music on Friday, 4 December 2015