Part sensei. Part midwife. All fiddle, all the time.
As a fiddle teacher and adjunct fiddle instructor at Amherst College, Franco-American fiddle master Donna Hebert brings to her work a passion for helping her students give birth to the music within.
We sit at her kitchen table, sipping a cup of tea. She is casually
dressed in blue jeans and a black shirt. Her lively blue eyes are
intense and focused. “Teaching fiddle is 10-20% about the music and 80-90% about finding out how a student learns,” she says. “There is always a way in. My job as a teacher is to find it.”
During the course of a thirty-five year career as a dance musician, performer and teacher, Hébert has learned what it means to live in the moment. She thinks it’s a Zen thing. You can’t play music - really play music - unless you're fully present. Equally important is an attitude of self-acceptance and non-judgment. It is this approach of mindfulness and acceptance that she fosters in her students. “It’s all about allowing yourself to be where you are.”
This is often difficult, particularly for students who are accomplished violinists. “They have been playing most of their lives. They have superb technical skills. They think playing the fiddle should be easy. But then they have to create rhythms with their bow with no idea where to find them because they have been relying on written music their whole life.”
Having begun with violin lessons in childhood, Hébert can empathize. She recounts her own struggle as a self-educating fiddler and recalls a mentor who gave her a piece of advice she relies on to this day. “I was frustrated by my inability to get a certain rhythm,” Donna says “and he looked at me and said, ‘If you do not know something, you simply do not know it,’ giving me permission to find out whatever I needed to learn."
Hébert frequently relates this story to her adult novice fiddle
classes, where men and women in the 40’s, 50’s and 60’s are taking up the instrument for the first time. These people are at the top of their game professionally - - lawyers, engineers, and businessmen. They are used to succeeding. It can be unnerving to be novices. “I give people permission to be utterly frustrated,” says Hébert. “It takes great courage to begin playing as an adult. I respect that courage and want to nurture it.”
An intuitive woman, Hébert tries to tailor her approach to the
individual needs of her students. Sometimes this means taking risks. During one of her recent adult classes in a small, tight-knit group of which the writer is a member, Donna decided to act on a hunch. She wanted to help a student, a successful engineer, who, after several years of lessons, was still quite tentative in his playing. She stopped the class, turned to him and asked with great compassion, “Do you feel that you have to be perfect?” Her question sparked a discussion about the expectations placed upon the man by his father and his fear of making a mistake, a story that resonated with his fellow students. “You aren’t here to be perfect,” Hébert reminded them. “You are here to give birth to the music inside of you.” By the end of the class, they were all playing with more strength. The following week, the engineer returned to class and stunned everyone with his bold and confident new sound.
In addition to focus and self-acceptance, being able to learn tunes by ear is key to developing proficiency as a fiddler, says Hébert. “The main thing is to get off the page because the music doesn’t live on the page - it lives inside us.” Getting off the page liberates a fiddler to experiment with rhythms and bowings and make a piece their own.
Be they novice fiddlers or classical string players, for those who will risk putting down the sheet music, the rewards can be enormous. Last year Jane Ezbicki, the Fine Arts Director and High School Orchestra Conductor of Wayland, MA schools, hired Donna and her Groovemama colleagues to present a workshop for her high school orchestra students. Ms. Ezbicki was astounded by the results. “Donna and her colleagues changed the way my students and I think about fiddling. They actually helped us to feel confident enough to turn over our music
close our eyes and play independently. I even started playing Mozart the following day in a different style - much lighter and more at ease.”
And this autonomy of rhythm, says Hébert, is only part of what fiddling has to offer the world of classical violin. “Control over what you play is big deal for classical musicians. They have to play what’s on the page. In an orchestra, they have to play it the way the conductor wants them to. Playing fiddle music, we get to choose not only the tunes, but also the rhythms, creating variations, adding our own dynamics and playing around with the melody. There's a lot of freedom in that."
During a 35-year career, Hébert has taken on many a musical challenge - running a contradance in Concord MA for ten years and starting seminal contradance band Yankee Ingenuity; singing out on political issues with ‘80s female quartet Rude Girls; preserving, presenting, documenting and performing French-Canadian music with Chanterelle and the Beaudoin Project; and developing and conducting yearly workshops for young musicians at the Old Songs and Philadelphia Folk Festivals with Groovemama. Donna has also released several solo CDs and produced recordings and videos for other musicians, including a 2003 instructional DVD from Appalachian Old-Time fiddler Alan Jabbour.
As her daughter prepares to depart for NYU in the fall, Hébert embarks upon the next phase of her musical career, launching a music publishing house, Fiddling Demystified, offering fiddle-music based instructional materials for string players. The first volume, “A Practical Guide for String Players,” is a 70-page guide to fiddle styles and techniques. The book and instructional CDs contain 31 traditional and original tunes, fully styled with chords and lessons. Coming soon are a Novice Practice booklet and CD and an instructional DVD of Franco-American fiddling, "Fiddling With A French Accent."
Thirty-five years is a long time to do anything. When asked what keeps her going, Hébert smiles. “It’s the grin on the face of one of my students who has just figured something out. It’s the feeling of accomplishment they go home with that gives my life a deeper purpose.” And then she adds, “It’s also the music itself. I fell down the rabbit hole into 'fiddle earth' thirty-five years ago. Why am I still here? I’m eternally curious and excited about the music and where it will take me. There so many tunes and so little time!”
