| When she
considers the new direction her life has taken in recent years,
Lori Brockway, '89 MEd, suspects her grandfather may
have had something to do with it. The family story is that when
she was a fussy baby, her grandfather--a horse rancher who had
homesteaded in Eastern Montana--could calm her by holding her
on his lap and playing his mandolin. |
| Now Brockway,
after a 28-year-career in education, spends most of her time
as business manager of the Montana Mandolin Society. "The job
includes being the booking agent, travel agent, marketing manager,
fiscal manager, grant writer, school workshop coordinator and
curriculum planner, shirt ironer, hair comber and stage fright
soother," Brockway says. In the four years the Montana Mandolin
Society has been in existence, Brockway has demonstrated those
skills all over the state--and in Japan when the group toured
and performed there in July 2002. |
| Mandolins
reentered Brockway's life via Dennis White, who was a substitute
music teacher in Bozeman's Longfellow Elementary School where
Brockway was principal. She asked him to teach the Longfellow
students about the diversity of stringed instruments. As a culmination
of this project, White organized some of his private students
and a few musicians from the various bands he'd been playing
with to give a concert in the Longfellow School gym. |
| "It was
a tremendous success," White says. "There were 350 people stuffed
into that gym, listing to acoustic, old-time music with no amplification.
It was a new experience for many of them." |
| About that
time, White came across a photograph of the Bozeman Mandolin
Society taken in 1902. He showed it to Brockway and they decided
to revive the turn-of-the century music. Brockway wrote some
grants and they filed papers to become a nonprofit organization
in 1999. Ten months later the group issued its first CD, "As
Far As I Can See," and in 2001 they hosted the annual convention
of the Classical Mandolin Society of America in Bozeman. That
led to an invitation from Japanese mandolin impresario Ken Tanioka
to tour in Japan in 2002. |
| That year
also saw their second CD, "Bridger Waltz." This year they are
issuing a third CD, "Mosaic." Each CD features traditional tunes,
adaptations of other composers, and original works, mostly composed
by White. |
| Like most
bands, the membership of the Montana Mandolin Society is fluid
but there are inevitably MSU connections in the group. Violinist
Sarah Williams works in research at the MSU Renne Library and
Lindsay Turnquist who plays hammer dulcimer is at the MSU bookstore.
Professor of music Alan Leech serves on the Society's board
of directors. |
| "The pre-jazz
era of the mandolin societies draws on early American folk,
pre-Sousa marches and simple waltzes, giving insight into some
of the music that text books most often don't treat," says Craig
Hall, '91 Mus. Best known as a jazz guitarist and bassist,
Hall has played mandolin, acoustic guitar and bass with the
Society. In October he wrote from Prague where he was playing
jazz with the Montana group Springhill, "Dennis has conglomerated
a group which centers around the mandolin family but includes
other instruments (cello, violins and hammered dulcimer) that
other mandolin groups have not traditionally included. This
makes our sound sort of unique. |
| "Our willingness
to break with the past is what has interested the Japanese and
others in our group," Hall adds. "I think that openness to new
instrumentation is our little contribution to the modern mandolin
orchestra scene. Dennis has used his North Carolina upbringing
to apply some mid-20th century American folk instrumentations
to this early 20th century music, and so a new twist is put
onto some earlier music in a real appropriate way." |
| Every time
they play, people come up afterward to share memories of their
grandparents or other relatives who played the mandolin or the
other traditional instruments. During what White calls America's
mandolin era, nearly every community had a mandolin society.
Although the original Bozeman Mandolin Society dissolved in
1906, Montana State College had a group that lasted for another
ten years. |
| "In the
end," White says, "it was Satchmo Armstrong and jazz that killed
the mandolin era." |
| But the
musicians in the Montana Mandolin Society may be ushering in
a new mandolin era. Many of their concerts are done in association
with school workshops where they take their traditional music
to young people who have never heard of it. In some schools,
they work with the kids studying orchestral stringed instruments
and appear in joint concerts with them. |
| It is
in these workshops that Brockway's education background comes
into its own, although she insists "all the members of the group
are natural-born teachers." And just to be sure she doesn't
lose touch with the world of education, Brockway is now teaching
part time at MSU. |
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