Irish fiddler Kate Rose is bringing her new and highly interactive “Wild Irish Fiddle” show to Mooney’s Irish Pub in Sedona every Tuesday evening.

Instead of just letting listeners sit back and watch someone play the fiddle, Rose actively tries to draw them into the show to learn more about not only Irish music but also Irish culture, history, politics and religion, an approach that was on full display during her April 30 performance. As she pointed out that every tune in Irish music has its own dance, she kept gently nudging her audience to get up and dance with her, even throwing in a few polka steps as she fiddled.

“Part of the fun of Irish music is putting together new tunes that haven’t been played together before,” Rose told her audience. “It’s really a very improvisational tradition. Great players, they never play the same tune the same way twice.”

Rose was formerly a member of a Flagstaff band called Greenlaw, where she met her accompanist, guitarist Armand Ramirez. “He has a different musical background but he really gets it,” Rose said. “He’s a great guy.”

Traditional Methods

“I learned by ear,” Rose, who had no formal musical training, said of her early acquaintance with the fiddle. “I was really lucky to learn in the traditional way. I grew up in New Hampshire and there was a lot of contradance music around, so I started sitting in on contradances, and the musicians were really welcoming, and they had learned themselves in the contradancing New England tradition, also by ear. So I started picking that up.

“There’s an improvisational aspect as well that’s really rich. You play it differently because you hear it differently and fill in the blanks. There’s only a few notes that you really need to nail down for it to be that tune.”

When she was 18, Rose took an extended trip to Ireland, particularly County Clare, where she studied with other players who had similarly learned by ear. Although she taught herself to read music as an adult, Rose commented that it remains challenging for her to associate sounds with the written notation. Conversely, learning traditional Irish music was simplified by the frequency with which it repeats motifs and phrases.

“That is very helpful,” Rose explained. “It’s like, that’s a tune that’s a composition that’s part of this tune … OK, it starts out like ‘The Mason’s Apron’ and then it goes into some other tune … the more tunes you know, the easier it is to learn because of that. A lot of them are in E minor … My favorite tunes are in G minor. The Irish say that it’s the saddest key of all. I don’t know if it’s true, but maybe.”

While both traditional and formal approaches to music education are now taught in Irish schools, Rose has mixed feelings about the effectiveness of that approach.

“It’s kind of like local accents,” Rose said. “It used to be you could tell the village someone was from by how they played. My style is kind of like that. I have a style that’s from a place where I mostly learned it. So they’re criticizing that as it’s part of the national curriculum, it’s getting more homogenized. They’re losing something in trying to do standard music training. And what I’ve noticed as well is that those players who have commented, they’re concerned that it’s losing some specificity, some grit, some of the roughness … There’s some concern that they’re learning too much music theory, maybe.”

Learning by ear “seems pretty easy to me,” Rose said. “I wouldn’t trade it for the other way.”

Playing for the Dancers

Rose also discovered that much of traditional Irish music learning and performance is built upon the relationship between movement and music.

“We say that the players play for the dancers and the dancers dance for the players. It’s an interchange. I love playing for dancers for that reason,” Rose said. “I didn’t learn about time signatures and things like that, but I learned this is a jig, these are the steps for a jig, this is a reel, these are the steps … it was dancing those steps that I understood the different kinds of tunes. And then for a long time, if I didn’t know what a tune was, I’d dance it and go, OK, that’s a jig, because it’s these steps.”

“I learned a lot about fiddling and about the music by doing farm work … timing the rhythms to the music,” Rose added.

It was this relationship between singing and dance that Rose was endeavoring to get across to her audience by enticing them to participate in it.

“Does anyone know how to do a polka?” Rose asked. “If you don’t, you may before the night is over … The polka is living proof that the Irish have always captured traditions from other places.” She also encouraged the audience to make animal noises: “Animal sounds are a traditional way of praising Irish music.”

Then Rose tried to get her listeners involved in making a christmas, “a genuine Irish tradition that you will not find within a few hundred miles of here.” A christmas is a ring of multiple dancers who join hands behind each other’s backs and spin in a circle, relying on one another for balance.

“We need at least three people,” Rose said. “Do I have four? I feel like I’m at an auction here.” She eventually ended up with five volunteers, who managed a few successful turns as she played before the christmas dissolved into laughter and wardrobe malfunctions. Funnily enough, the visitor from Galway was the first to get dizzy.

“It turned into a nightclub, [expletive]!” the girl with the pink hair exclaimed afterward. “We are not going home!”

For the less energetic patrons, Rose offered the waltz “Give Me Your Hand.”

“You can waltz with partners or you can waltz by yourself,” she suggested.

“It’s a very Irish thing to do to go from really solemn to really jolly on the turn of a dime,” Rose quipped during her April 30 show. To underline the point, she sang “Skibbereen,” which she described as “one of those nice uplifting Irish songs about immigration,” a tale of a family’s devastation by the potato famine and their resolution to revenge themselves on the English. Her accompanist served as her “winder” for the number, a supporting role in Irish traditional music in which the winder is the recipient of a cranking hand motion used as emotional relief by a performer.

Rose then followed the despairing “Skibbereen” immediately with a pair of jaunty hornpipes, Julie Conway’s and “Galway Bay.” No sooner did she finish “Galway Bay” than a visitor from Galway walked into the pub.

“Part of the fun of Irish music is putting together new tunes that haven’t been played together before,” Rose said.

Keep It Fey

As an illustration, Rose then played the reels “The Mountain Road” and “The Fairy Folk” as a single set, warm, rich and very alive.

“A lot of great musicians say they learned their music from the fairies,” Rose told the audience. “Whether they were coming home from the pub one night and stumbled into a ditch, or … ” She let her listeners decide for themselves how much of a role the pub might have played in the Irish experience of musical magic.

“Paganism still flourishes,” Rose said after the show. “It still feels very pagan to me in Ireland. It wasn’t as scary to be pagan and very thinly veil your practices in Catholicism.”

Playing “Kildare Fancy,” she reminded the audience that the town of Kildare was the location of a famous abbey founded to honor Saint Brigid, who was a pre-Christian Irish goddess of wisdom and poetry later incorporated into the Catholic church as a saint.

Rose also compared the Irish situation to the persistence of traditional Chinese religious practices in the face of state suppression, remembering her visit to a temple in China, during which she discovered suppliants burning incense before a portrait of Mao Tse-tung in the traditional fashion.

“It wasn’t taboo or scary to be a witch,” Rose added of her Irish experiences. “People I knew, they were my neighbors, had consulted witches.” She then told the story of how the famous witch Biddy Early glued an unjust landlord to the ground when he annoyed her.

“It was one of her feats of resistance,” Rose laughed. “I guess he got unglued eventually and never came back, so she saved the people from the landlord.”

During her time in Europe, Rose obtained a Ph.D. in comparative literature from the University of Montpellier in France, specializing in the study of magical realism and decolonization, which she sees as linked to the musical tradition that she practices.

“It ties in with Irish music because there’s all that stuff about the fairies and all that lore and paganism,” Rose said. “It’s all about oppression as well and creating a voice beyond oppression … in this case the voice of using magic and literature and using the supernatural.”

Rebel Music

A particularly rousing component of Rose’s show was the stress she laid on the links between musical performance and resistance to tyranny in Irish history.

“She was very afraid of Irish music, that it would incite Irish people to rebel,” Rose said of Elizabeth I’s 1603 order to execute all independent harpers who were not licensed by an English officer before discussing how the Irish responded to suppression of their musical traditions by resorting to improvised instruments. One such workaround was playing the spoons, which Rose demonstrated as she sang the sea shanty “The Maid on the Shore.” Another was playing the simple and easily-concealable whistle, on which Rose rendered Tommy Potts’ “The Butterfly.”

“Part of the recipe to colonize an oppressed people is to get rid of their music,” Rose said. “Ban their language, but also ban their music. That’s what’s happened in a lot of colonial situations to kill the soul of a people. But it never seems to work. The music just goes deeper. Then it really becomes a form of resistance. It becomes a question of life or death. The old players play like their life depends on it, and it’s that quality I don’t hear as much in younger players … There’s an urgency to their playing. It’s amazing that people keep tunes alive when they’re starving and oppressed and could be killed for it.”

“They also call it ‘the music,’” Rose added. “Music is like Mozart and all that, but ‘the music’ is the music of the people, the music that is ours.”

The Music of the People

“The music is really of the people, and it remains that way,” Rose reflected on the prevalence of live music in daily life in Ireland and the respect accorded musicians. “I’ve seen world-class musicians who are really famous and play really big places in the world, and then they play a weekly gig at the local pub in some little town. They’re very humble people, so I always liked that about them. They’re very welcoming to beginners and people who want to learn, they’re just treated like any other local. And the audiences are respectful of the music, especially singing … these world-class musicians are playing, and then someone wants to sing a song, just any old farmer singing something out of tune, everyone will go dead quiet, including these great musicians, and sit there with their instruments and respectfully listen.”

Her experience in Ireland stands in great contrast to the behavior of many of the audience, who were too busy talking about their personal lives to pay attention to the cultural tradition unfolding in front of them.

“Theirs is a different way of judging music,” Rose summarized. “It’s less on technique and more on the performance from the heart, and people will be really respectful … You get old players, and then you get some fancy person coming and showing off, and they’d be like, ‘Is he any good? I can’t tell,’ and they wouldn’t be criticizing him, they honestly wouldn’t know … because it’s not moving [them] … Vice versa, all these old players who are playing scratchy and out of tune, they’ve got something that really moves you, that gets to the heart of it. That’s what I’m trying to bring back, that perspective.”

Up Next

“I’ll always have new material. Every show is different. And I’m learning all the time as a performer what works,” Rose said. “It’s mostly tourists who come here, and when you’re out of town, it’s great to be able to sit down somewhere and you get to know people and talk to them and you form a bond together. So it’s kind of a focal point to bring people together, give them a memorable experience. I like to do that for the community, too.”

“People connect with it because it’s some part of their roots,” Rose added. “But even native people have been really into it … I love that universality of it that doesn’t require an ethnic background. I like the image that when we go really deeply into our roots, they all connect.”