Worksongs for Working Farms
at Sub Edge Farm. Presented by Bennett Konesni, Edith Gawler, and friends. Join Bennett Konesni and Edith Gawler (of Sylvester Manor and worksongs.org) for this small-group, hands-on, sing-out workshop at Sub Edge Farm in Farmington. Participants will learn a collection of songs useful on vegetable farms with working crews. In the process, we'll discuss how to use worksongs as a cultural technology, a tool you can use to improve your effectiveness in the field and transform… Show more your experience of mundane handwork. Based on new experience and insights from using worksongs during the 2014 season, we will cover simple call and response songs from the Americas and Africa, and may touch on livestock calls of Europe and Asia. We'll explore the careful steps you can take with your fellow cultivators to introduce songs into the field setting and touch on details such as leader/group dynamics, space and song layout, working patterns, and the history and modern practice of this lively and useful agrarian tradition.
Suggested Donation: $10.00
About Edith and Bennett: Edith & Bennett (Edith Gawler and Bennett Konesni) are musicians and worksong scholars who together play old-time fiddle, banjo, Swedish dance tunes, and farmer’s ballads and hollers. Edith Gawler grew up in Maine as a member of the legendary Gawler Family Band, which has now grown to include her husband, Bennett Konesni. As a duo, she and Bennett play old-time fiddle and banjo music, Swedish dance tunes, and sing farmer’s ballads and hollers. They teach worksongs together in a variety of settings across the country. Not long ago, Edith finished her architectural thesis at Syracuse University, which looks to draw on the principles of the local sustainable food movement as a model for a new architecture. Bennett Konesni is co-founder of Sylvester Manor, a 243-acre educational farm on Shelter Island, NY on a piece of land that has been in his family since 1652. His roles there include teaching worksongs to the farm crew and directing the annual fall festival “Plant & Sing”, which brings the community to the farm to complete two week’s worth of garlic shucking and planting in a single morning, all while singing worksongs. As a student at Middlebury College, Bennett co-founded the student farm, and majored in Music, Anthropology and Environmental Studies, and upon graduation he was awarded a Thomas J Watson fellowship to spend a year studying worksongs on three continents. Though he received his MBA from Antioch University New England in 2009, his passion is still worksongs, music that transforms labor into something between work and play. He envisions a world in which farmers, cooks, and eaters once again sing in fields, kitchens, and at the table. Together, Edith and Bennett balance their life on Shelter Island with their home in Maine. In January 2013 they started their own homestead in Belfast, Maine, and they still perform with several bands, including their Shelter Island-based group, The Sylvester Manor Worksongers, their Maine groups, the Gawler Sisters and Family bands, and their roots-music duo “Edith & Bennett.”
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