Episode 1: Introducing the Find Your Lilt Podcast

Hannah Harris introduces her new podcast, Find Your Lilt, where she aims to have deeper conversations about Irish traditional music. She shares her background as a classical violinist who found her passion for Irish fiddling and her journey in the music scene. The podcast will cover various topics related to being a traditional Irish musician, including gigging, learning the music, travel stories, and connecting over a shared love of the style of playing. Hannah invites guests to share their experiences and perspectives, creating a valuable resource for those interested in Irish music.

Main Takeaways:

• Find Your Lilt is a podcast that explores the world of Irish traditional music and aims to have deeper conversations about the genre.

• Hannah Harris shares her background as a classical violinist who found her passion for Irish fiddling.

• The podcast will cover various topics related to being a traditional Irish musician, including gigging, learning the music, travel stories, and connecting over a shared love of the style of playing.

• Guests will be invited to share their experiences and perspectives, creating a valuable resource for those interested in Irish music.

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Welcome, welcome, welcome to the Find Your Little Podcast. My name is Hannah Harris and I am your host of this show. I am so excited to be here. This project has been a very long time in coming, so you may know me previously from YouTube or perhaps you've come across one of my online courses. Maybe you're on my weekly Irish fiddle newsletter that I send out every Sunday talking about getting the real feel for Irish traditional music. But now I have an audio component, which is super exciting.

It's been a very long time coming where you know I've been listening to podcasts for probably, I don't know, seven years or so. And you know you always think when you're listening to something or maybe reading a book or listening to an album and you're like, what would happen if I created my own thing here? What if I was the host of a podcast? And here I am. So I have long been thinking about this. I've had a few friends that are like, Hannah, you should start a podcast, you should start a podcast. And so this is for you, my friend. I am getting this podcast off the ground at long last. It's just such a treat to be here.

So I do have some notes in front of me to hopefully keep me on track and make sure that this is a fairly succinct episode. I'm not rambling too much, but I do want these to be more off the cuff. You know, I'm a casual person. I like to feel like this is just maybe a bit more of a casual chat. We're sitting over a pint and, you know, listening to some trad music here and just shoot in the breeze about what it means to be an Irish musician in this day and age. So that is very much what this podcast is intended to be like. I do have, as I said, a bit of a script in front of me just to make sure I don't go too far off track, but hopefully you enjoy this more candid style of conversation.

So for this introductory episode, I figured I would tell you a little bit more about me in case this is our first time meeting, and a little bit more about the concept for this show. So the show is called Find Your Lilt. And essentially, I want to have deeper conversations around topics that I share in my weekly newsletter. So this is all about, you know, finding the real feel for Irish fiddling. As I said, navigating the world of Irish traditional music here in the 21st century.

So whether that's allowing myself to riff for a solo episode or having conversations with someone in the traditional music space, that's really what this podcast is going to be. It'll be a mix of solo episodes and guest episodes. I'm very excited to talk to some peers and mentors of mine and get their take on what they're up to these days and how they see the world of Irish fiddling. So very excited to collaborate with some more guests in the future.

The podcast is really meant to cover all the ins and outs of being a traditional Irish musician from gigging to learning the music to travel stories and just connecting over a shared love of this style of playing. I want it to be a valuable resource to someone coming to Irish music later in life or maybe you've come from a different background like I have from classical music and it should just really feel like a cozy space like we're swapping stories over a pint.

So sometimes the conversation is going to be light, sometimes we can get a little bit deeper, but it should showcase the community, the joy and the exploration because again, we're talking about Finding Your Lilt. So this is kind of like a big, you know, adventure series where there's not really a set map of how to play Irish fiddle music well, but we're just going to, you know, take these little signposts. Look at that tree as a marker over there and that river as a marker over here and use that to guide us as we are learning more and exploring this wonderful, wonderful world of Irish music.

We'll be doing a lot of chat about what great fiddle player Liz Knowles calls the in -between. So here I am in between the classical worlds and the Irish traditional fiddle world, the American and the Irish worlds, and just really exploring all of the different concepts that come up with that.

Now, if we're going to have these conversations about finding your lilt then you probably should know a couple of things about me. So I am based in Michigan now. I have a classical background. Back when I was five years old, my mom told me to pick an instrument to learn, and I decided that I wanted to learn the violin. And I can't remember what made me pick that, but I picked it and I have stuck with it for the past several decades now, so I'm glad that I made that choice, so thank you to Younger Me for that.

I started out as a Suzuki student, so you know, learning by ear definitely had that benefit as a child, getting to get very familiar with listening to the music. But about three or four, maybe five years into my classical music training, I was getting a little bored, I was getting frustrated with not sounding very good and wanting to make more progress than what I was seeing in my playing. And so my teacher at the time, she had this brilliant idea to introduce me to fiddle tunes. And suddenly that just unlocked something in me that was, I was able to play a lot easier. I got the music, like I could hear it and then I could translate it to my instrument. I had enough of that classical technique training that I could start to translate those concepts of what I was hearing onto what I was playing.

Really the fiddling was just where I was able to shine more. So I found my happy place, and that really kept me going.

There was a very, kind of a roundabout journey to get to Irish traditional music specifically, so I think probably around that time that my teacher was introducing fiddle tunes, that was about when Celtic Woman started touring, so they came through town in Charlotte, North Carolina. I went with my parents to see them, and I was just in awe of the pretty dresses and the high heels and dancing around on stage. And of course, that's nothing like any of what I do these days with performing Irish music, but it was very much a good stepping point into getting familiar with the tunes and this type of music. So my dad would listen to CDs from William Coulter, Alasdair Fraser, so kind of that Irish and Scottish mix. So I grew up listening to those a lot just around the house.

Then eventually around college, I went to the Swannanoa Gathering for the very first time in the mountains of North Carolina. Ironically, I never actually went to Swannanoa while I lived in North Carolina, but we had moved to Georgia by that point. And so I got to go explore another part of my native home state. And that was a lot of fun to be able to tap into the Irish, Scottish and Cape Breton music scene from the mountains of North Carolina. And that definitely kickstarted this spark. So that was about when I decided, you know, here I am in college, not really sure what I want to do with my life, but all of a sudden it was like, you know what? I really like this music. It still clicks with me. It still does really well. And I want to keep doing it.

So while I was at Swannanoa, I learned about all these other great camps that were out there and all these other opportunities. In the summer of 2015, I actually went to four different events in four different countries. I started off going to the Blas Summer Music Program at University of Limerick. So that was over in Ireland. Then coming back to the Swannanoa Gathering again for another week the following year. And then going to the Royal Conservatory in Glasgow for a Scottish trad music week, and then the adult week at the Gaelic College in Cape Breton. So got a whole lot of exposure to this music, really just getting to dive in, going into these intense weeks of learning about each of the musical styles, and that once again cemented the whole fact of, I really like this community, I really like these people.

I want to keep doing this and let's see how I can make that be more of my life.

Then after my second year at Swannanoa, I started hearing, okay, so you've been to University of Limerick. Have you considered applying for your master's degree over there in Ireland? And have you considered maybe looking at University College of Cork too? So I was thinking, well, you know, I've already been to Limerick, and it's not really one of those been there done that, but maybe it was for me at the time. And so what would happen if I went to UCC instead?

So going down to Cork and exploring a totally new city that I had never set foot in until I moved there for eight months. So that was a really, really neat experience to do just fresh out of college from undergrad and then going and moving over to Cork for a year. So once again, these pieces are starting to cement really getting me into the space of wanting to stick to Irish music.

Near the end of my time in Cork, I got this email from a previous boss of mine who I had worked for up in northern Michigan for a summer. We had a family cottage up on the lake up there, so we would go up there every summer. And I was starting to feel a bit of a pull to spend more time in Michigan and really explore and see what it would be like to live in a totally different state and not live in the southeast even, because I spent most of my life in North Carolina and Georgia.

So I followed that pull and I am still in Michigan today. I'm in a different space now than I was before, so I'm a little bit more towards the center of the state. But I have been in Michigan for the past seven, eight years and have really enjoyed getting to know the Irish music scene here. I've built my business online and now basically I spend a lot of time performing and teaching and I run my own online studio where I teach people to “find their lilt!” So the podcast really, really does tie into this whole concept.

And really right around the time that I was moving to Michigan, I started listening to podcasts, I was thinking, you know, I don't always want to stay in this retail job that I'm working for. And I want to make music more of my full time thing. So that is kind of what got me into listening to podcasts, because I would listen to a lot of business related ones.

But then there were also some great traditional music ones. I remember I think the Trad Cafe might have been my first podcast hosted by Neil Pearlman. And so I really enjoyed hearing interviews of other musicians talking about life as a traditional musician. And I would also listen to Shannon Heaton's podcast, Irish Music Stories. Now, I listen to the Lizzes podcast, Liz Carroll and Liz Knowles. They've got a great show where they have these conversations about Irish fiddling and all that wonderful stuff. I definitely would listen to the Blarney Pilgrim's podcast. So there's so many great podcasts out there around Irish traditional music.

And I really wanted to bring this particular show, not just because it's coming from me, I'm a millennial here just in my very early 30s. So being able to kind of bring that voice to the scene a little bit more, but also just to continue this conversation around developing the real feel for Irish music, particularly from someone who did not grow up in the tradition.

So I'm very excited to have guests on that have had similar experiences and also very different experiences so we can just kind of talk about what that means and does it matter or does it mean anything? And just so many great topics in the works here. So that is definitely something I'm looking forward to with this show.

So for this introductory episode here, I want to keep things pretty short, but I did want to give you an idea of what we're going to be talking about and who I am, just in case, again, this might be your first time stumbling across me and hey, you decided to start from the beginning and click on the introductory episode. So more power to you.

But yeah, this is really going to be in some ways covering a lot of what I cover in my course. So, you know, we'll talk about tone, phrasing, rhythm, speed, wrist flexibility, you know, different technical things with the fiddle. But there's also a lot of other elements that I would love to get other people's perspectives on as well and dig deeper in on my own perspectives.

So these could be things like performance anxiety, listening to the tunes, the importance of listening, and just the things that all come up around the space. So maybe we might get into session etiquette or other topics like that. The possibilities are endless. Again, this is an exploration. This is going to be a fun adventure. And I am so, so excited to be bringing this podcast as a new offering to what I already have online.

So I look forward to getting to know you and best way that you and I can connect, because I know a lot of this is a podcast where I'm talking into a mic and I'm not necessarily getting to see you right across from me on the screen. I'm looking at myself on the screen here and wishing I was looking at somebody else, but I, this is a great way for us to connect would be on my free community. So if you're not familiar with the word ceol, that is C -E -O -L. That means “music” in the Irish language.

There was already a “Hannah Harris Music” on Facebook when I made my business page over there, so I decided, you know, I think I'm probably going to be sticking to the Irish music space, so it's safe to say I can go with Hannah Harris Ceol for a business name. So come on over to the community! Share your thoughts, get to know other fiddlers, other musicians in the scene, and I look forward to that being a space where we can chat further about what I've covered in these episodes, where you can connect with guests and where you can talk to each other. So we're going to really celebrate the whole community of Irish music here in this online forum space.

So I thank you so much for listening to this very first episode. And I'm again, very much looking forward to seeing you in a future episode. So thank you so much for listening (reading 😉) and I'll chat with you next time.