NEW SHARON – A concert featuring fiddle artist and singer Lissa Schneckenburger and her guitarist, Bethany Waickman will be held 7 p.m. on Saturday, Jan. 21 at New Sharon Congregational Church UCC, 21 Cape Cod Hill Road in New Sharon.
Raised in a small town in Maine and now living in Vermont, Schneckenburger grew up with music. She began playing fiddle at the age of six, inspired by her mother’s interest in folk music and a family friend who was a professional violinist. Soon she was studying with influential Maine fiddler Greg Boardman and sitting in with the Maine Country Dance Orchestra. By the time she was in high school she was playing concerts on her own, specializing in the sprightly New England dance tunes that combine influences from the British Isles and Quebec with homegrown twists that have been evolving since Colonial days.
Another of her major influences was the diverse musical community that she found at fiddle camps, where she had a chance to play with and learn from a wide variety of musicians including noted Scottish fiddler Alasdair Fraser. In 2001 she graduated from the New England Conservatory of Music with a degree in contemporary improvisation, and since then has been performing around the US and internationally for a growing audience of enthusiastic listeners. She has recorded seven CDs, (four solo and three with
various groups).
Recently, she has been closely studying the roots of the Downeast traditional music that she first heard as a young girl. Her latest project is a pair of CDs dedicated to reintroducing some wonderful but largely forgotten songs and tunes from New England that she uncovered through archival research at the University of Maine and elsewhere.
The concert kicks off the church’s “6 Months of Music” concert series intended to welcome new people into the church. Tickets are only $10 and are available at Douin’s Market in New Sharon and Everyday Music in Farmington. If there are tickets left over they will be sold at the door, but it is expected to sell out so people will want to be getting their tickets ahead of time, organizers said.
