Middle Player News Today

The Yadkin Arts Council presents the 8th Annual Sounds of the Mountains Concert Series in partnership with the Blue Ridge Music Center

Prior to 1961, public performance of Irish traditional music in Galway took place primarily in the form of céilís in large dancehalls — namely in the Hangar, the Commercial and the Astaire. These were enormously popular — remember the hundreds of bicycles parked outside the Hangar on a Sunday night — but they began to go out of fashion in the sixties and were regarded as old fashioned and backward.

Offering an

Dewey Hall will present "An Evening with Aaron Jonah Lewis" on Friday, April 22. An old-time fiddle workshop from 5:30 to 6:30 p.m. will be followed by a concert at

Two years ago, bassist Dave Riggs, hurdy-gurdy player Ryan Baker and fiddler Claire Sweeney began experimenting with traditional Celtic and Eastern European music. From there, the musical trio became Autumn Equinox. But what’s unique about this particular band isn’t the music itself rather how they play it, according to Riggs. “What attracts me to it is not the tradition but the sort of hypnotic nature of this nyckelharpa, which sounds like a dozen fiddle players playing at once ...

An Appalachian native has found her own identity through her fiddle. Hayley King continues to connect with her passions, goals and roots through a double major in traditional music and Spanish at Morehead State University.  “I consider both languages and music as an art,” said King, a Ridgeway, South Carolina native. “I feel like at the root of it all, language and music are both means of self-expression, and in my case the way I express my emotions is through fiddle music.â�...