Artichoke Community Music Teachers

Jan DeWeese

Music Bio

My primary instrument is the mandolin, on which I teach a full range of styles (see my faculty web page at Lewis & Clark College). At all levels I integrate music theory and ear training into technique studies. This way, repertoire materials are viewed from their foundations up as playing skills grow. Through participation in my in-class analysis and composition process, the students begin early on to manage the nuts and bolts of idea making. Style in this way comes to be known as a balance of cultural and structural elements. A number of other instruments help bring this integrative principle to life in the folk styles we know and love. Below are some of the projects currently going on in my studio.

My kindergartners are strumming ukeleles (with their moms on mandolins and banjos) to Appalachian and Woodie Guthrie songs, as well as to their own poems I help craft to melody and chords. My elementary/middle-school kids are playing guitar and mandolin duets in French (I’m on mountain dulcimer) and Irish (I’m on tinwhistle and bodhran) musics.

I have high-schoolers exploring the African roots of blues and ragtime, Brazilian choro counterpoint and samba rhythmics, my own New Orleans and Latin jazz settings of Doc Watson and Bob Dylan songs (for mandolin, clarinet, keyboard, and guitar/vocals), and some have just completed a CD of traditional Irish music (for mandolin, cittern, flute, whistle, bodhran, and guitar/vocals). My college students are writing songs about the Iraq war, frailing banjos (old-timey, Irish, blues, Cuban son styles), composing Irish tune variations and cittern accompaniments, and building bluegrass mandolin melodies from the chordal/scalar unfoldings of structural harmonies and analysis of my transcriptions of Monroe solos.

The majority of those coming to my studio are fully in their working lives, into the long term pursuit of all the above styles and more, but mostly into the heart of that Celtic/European/African complex we call American folk music. My many retirees are amongst the most dedicated and inspiring. The oldest, an 86-year-old gentleman who was a bombadier in England during WWII, now gets to put guitar chords to songs he loved to do in the village pubs there.

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