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Well, I attended my first MD festival a couple of weeks ago, and I've been considering the event and gauging my reactions to the experience. It was the 1st Annual New Mexico Mountain Dulcimer Festival held in Albuquerque, NM. Here's the website if you're interested in the info/pics http://www.reefnews.com/nmdulcfest/.
(Irma Reeder, NM Dulcimer Festival Director, Comment, May 2011) Note new website is www.NMDulcFest.com, the old site will direct traffic to the new festival site for a while. Also note we've changed the festival name to the New Mexico Dulcimer Festival as we've added hammered dulcimer for 2011.
Overall, it was a great experience. I enjoyed being immersed in the dulcimer community for two days, and it was wonderful to see, study, admire, and even drool over some of the amazing instruments. For a first-time effort, the festival was amazingly well run. Everything happened on time, meals were served as planned, all handouts were ready and waiting for the participants, registration took less than a minute.
(Comment, May 2011) Fantastic! We were certainly flying by the seat of our pants at times, and, oh! the stories I could tell about numerous last minute crises that we took great care to keep behind the scenes and make sure they didn't impact the festival! All good lessons for 2011.
The only serious complaint I can actually register is against myself. I signed up for all of the beginner/advanced beginner workshops because playing in the DAd tuning is new to me. Bad, bad, bad! Too late to make a change, one of the instructors gave a sound piece of advice that I will follow in the future. When signing up for workshops, sign up for the ones that you think might be a step or two ahead of you. You may feel a little bit lost at first, but you'll be learning more if you're just outside of your "comfort zone".
(Comment, May 2011) I regret you viewed things as "too late to make a change". Our registration form workshop sign up was intended to help us estimate needed handouts for each workshop. At orientation, I announced that this was not a commitment, attendees could take any workshop they wanted to. We'll communicate this better for 2011.The instructors:
(Comment, May 2011) I'm so glad that you enjoyed both the classes and the interaction! This year we'll have a bit more experience and I will have done a better job at delegating a multitude of details to very willing volunteers. I hope to enjoy having more time to get to know and visit with our guests! Jonathan is so encouraging - he's able to get just about anyone to do just about anything!Aubrey Atwater - Obviously the "headliner" of the event, Aubrey was as talented as I expected her to be. I would have liked to attend more of her workshops, but as indicated previously, I made an error in judgment when choosing my classes. Her jam workshop and jam session were amazing. I learned a lot about playing when I don't really know the tune and how to "read" the leader. Outside of the workshops, Aubrey was a bit less accessible. She appeared to be drawn to conversing with the better players and then would "disappear" for awhile. But heck, she's an artist!
(Comment, May 2011) For 2010, our new organization could only afford a single guest instructor, and we were thrilled to bring in Aubrey. Rhode Island, where Aubrey lives, is near sea level. The city of Albuquerque is about 1 mile elevation (festival site was at 5750 feet). Festival attendees probably didn't realize that Aubrey was having to "disappear" to the vacant auditorium throughout the event to condition herself to clogging at high altitude in order to pull off her incredible concert demonstrations.The concerts were phenomenal! I talked my husband into joining me for the Saturday night concert, and he was nearly as mesmerized as me. A feat for a man who had a CD collection of rap music when we met. I can't add any more to the concert experience without writing a gushing novel, so I'll stop here.