Another Season - So Many Tunes ...

Contratopia officially kicked off our 2006-2007 season on Oct. 28 at a wedding dance held in the Town Hall at Marine on St. Croix, MN. And what a dance it was! Sir Markus and Lady Rebecca held court surrounded by dozens of the finest lords and ladies.

Robin Nelson called wonderful dances and the band members enjoyed each others' company while playing several sets of either all new tunes or new combinations of old and new. We played "Aubrey and Andrew's Wedding" for the first time in public as a band and it was a particularly sweet performance. You can download a PDF file of the sheet music for this tune at this address: www.contratopia.com/Aubreys.pdf

This was sort of our shakedown cruise to prepare for our visit to Glen Echo and Bluemont in November (17th-19th) and I would say that we are definitely ready for the Spanish Ballroom.

You can find our 2006-2007 schedule over on the "dances and news" page of the Contratopia website. Stop and say hello if you make it to one of our dances.

(Photo courtesy of Pat O'Loughlin)

CMSA 2006

I just returned from the annual convention of the Classical Mandolin Society of America in Louisville, Kentucky. Four days and nights of total mando immersion.

One of the many highlights was getting to play with the Atlanta Mandolin Orchestra as they performed my mandolin orchestra arrangement of "Smitten". They did a great job and the audience seemed to really enjoy it. The AMO was kind enough to sell Contratopia's Smitten CD alongside their own new recording after the concert and we sold several that way.

If you want to see some pictures and hear some sound clips from the convention you can go to the CMSA website (http://www.classicalmandolinsociety.org/) and click on "virtual tour". You'll find me on the page of pictures from Friday leading my workshop on "18th Century English and Scottish Music for Mandolin."

Here's a link to the handout from that session with links to the actual music that we played that morning (http://academic.luther.edu/~goodinjo/cmsa2006.htm).

I had a good group of 40-50 players and it was a lot of fun.

(Thanks to David Betts for the photo.)

John

Pat & I just got done playing with fiddler Linda Breitag for the Friday night dance at the 25th Annual October Dance Weekend in St. Paul. More tomorrow night for me, Pat, Ken and David E. Joseph Pimenthal who we've met in Ames is the caller. Great fun. TTFN

Sample for the band

Here's a sample post. We can add links and images to our friendly and witty prose and poetry if we want. Here's the link to the Contratopia website.