This is not Swedish tunes, or BalFolk, or Klezmer or Old-Time, or Irish or Quebecois. But it’s a little like all of them.

Danish fiddle music is rooted in rural dance traditions. Many of the tunes we’ll explore will be accessible, playable, danceable tunes for the dances that are done at gatherings all over Denmark. We’ll also include some of the more peculiar tunes, some crooked tunes, and some contemporary tunes.

Traditionally the tunes were played on fiddles, accordions, clarinets, horns, and whatever else people had and could play. Like many traditional dance musicians in the past they were not trained musicians; they learned from their parents, grandparents, aunts, uncles, and neighbors.

We’ll start by playing some of the easier tunes at a relaxed tempo.  We’ll pick up speed and take on the more demanding tunes as the workshop progresses. 

Written music and links to recordings of the tunes will be available by request.

Bring your instrument and a music stand. And a pencil, and your sense of humor.

Laurie Indenbaum has been fiddling for dances in New England since 1976. She has played with numerous bands over the years, including Applejack, New England Swing, The Tune Police, The Full Catastrophe, and Bob’s Your Uncle.

Her fiddling is a hybrid dance style, made up of Quebecois, New England, Scandinavian and Old-Time. During the COVID years she went back to her fiddling roots, which began in Denmark in 1972, and has been playing pan-Scandinavian and Northern European tunes in the trio Scandi! During that time, she also began to collect, learn, and play tunes by women composers. Most recently she has been wallowing in Klezmer traditions, inspired by a trove of manuscripts discovered in the Vernadsky Library in Kiev, and recently digitized in a fascinating world-wide project by the Klezmer Institute.

Before retiring in 2019 Laurie was the business manager for violin-maker Douglas Cox, and plays on his Cathedrale Stradivarius model, Opus 717, made in 2012. She edited a collection of Bob McQuillen’s waltzes in 2012 and struggles to keep up with her repertoire, which was overloaded and out of control even before she started a project in 2023 to study, play, and preserve all of the tunes composed and published by Bob McQuillen during his lifetime, in celebration of what would have been his centennial.