Now in its fifteenth year, fiddlekids is a unique, fun-filled summer day camp devoted to traditional fiddle music. fiddlekids welcomes violin students and fiddlers ages 7 to 14 with at least one year's playing experience. No previous fiddling experience is required.
The fiddlekids experience
Our camp is a great opportunity for children to explore and learn various traditional fiddling styles—including bluegrass, American old-time, Appalachian, Celtic, jazz, swing, Klezmer‚—through tunes, songs, dance, and art.
The fiddlekids camp is wonderfully supportive in helping children develop a solid toehold with learning by ear. By memorizing tunes on-the-fly kids learn the language of fiddlers: the traditional emersion style of sharing and learning fiddle tunes. This sets many kids on a brand new trajectory, leaving them ready to participate in most folk music camps, jam sessions, and fiddle workshops, where learning by ear is expected. Learning by ear provides an entirely new level of confidence for kids who have trouble reading music, which is great because most people can play far better than they can read. And it encourages self-directed study. Once the kids have the necessary skills and confidence they can learn almost anything by ear.
In addition to fiddling, fiddlekids offers art and dance classes in small, age-based groups that provide enrichment and thematic connections with the music.
Camp culminates with the fiddlekids yearly recital, an exciting public performance extravaganza on the Freight & Salvage stage at 11:30 am, Saturday June 23. It's a lovely show that highlights the kids' accomplishments across a wide range of fiddling styles. It also showcases some of dances they learned from Erik Hoffman... and their beautiful artwork will be on display. By the end of the week most kids have memorized three to six tunes, learned entirely by ear, and they get the chance to fiddle most of those tunes at the concert.
Materials
When camp starts we'll email a link to the collection of instructor-made recordings for this year's camp. Please encourage your young fiddlers to listen daily, at home and/or during the camp commute car trips! They'll learn their fiddle tunes faster and more easily with this effortless exposure and reinforcement. There are fast and slow recordings for most tunes, and this can help enable a brief nightly review.
When camp ends each fiddlekid receives music notation for all fiddle tunes taught, plus some tunes that were recorded but untaught, usually about 24 tunes in all. These materials allow them to review tunes and fix details after camp, they provide kids the opportunity to learn tunes that they may have developed an interest in, and the notation helps them understand the tunes form another perspective.
Staff
As usual, we have a wonderful staff of fiddle teachers: John Blasquez, Julian Smedley, Caroline McCaskey, and Karen Celia Heil—and each child gets to have classes with three of these fiddle instructors. Please take a look at our staff bios, including our dance and art instructors: http://www.thefreight.org/fiddlekids-instructors
A day at the fiddlekids summer camp
Morning fiddle: Class I (Each activity period is roughly one hour)
Recess (10 to 15 minutes)
Morning fiddle: Class II
Dance/Art — half the camp goes to each activity
Lunch and lunch-time recess
Art/Dance — the kids that already had art now go to dance, and visa versa
Afternoon Fiddle: Class III
Snacks and pickup
Registration
To register for fiddlekids, send a completed application with a $200 non-refundable (upon acceptance) deposit made payable to: Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse.
Camp tuition of $520 includes a $100 materials fee to cover a fiddlekids t-shirt, CD of camp tunes, and healthy daily snacks. Early bird special price of $480 if tuition is paid in full by April 13, 2012. (Inquire about our sibling discount.)
The Fiddlekids camp is held at Berkwood Hedge School in Berkeley, California.
