Young string players join Sam Sweeney
Sam Sweeney’s Unearth Repeat, recorded at Cecil Sharp House
Members and alumni of National Youth Folk Ensemble join broadcast premiere on 27 August
Last month we welcomed Sam Sweeney and his band – Jack Rutter, Ben Nicholls and Louis Campbell – to Cecil Sharp House to play the whole of Sam’s new album Unearth Repeat in Kennedy Hall. Due to their cancelled tours and festivals, this is the first time they had played the album since recording it in September 2019. It was also the first time since Cecil Sharp House was closed in mid-March that music was played in the building – albeit to an audience of only one person, Katy Spicer (Chief Executive and Artistic Director of the English Folk Dance and Song Society).
A film of the performance will be broadcast online on Thursday 27 August at 7.30pm on Sam’s Facebook and YouTube pages.
As part of the online gig, Sam has invited four young string players – all former or current members of England’s National Youth Folk Ensemble – to perform solo from their homes. The evening will be a celebration of the current resurgence of English folk music.
Sam explains, “Since the National Youth Folk Ensemble was set up we’re witnessing a wonderful surge in interest and innovation in English folk music amongst young musicians, and I thought it would be lovely to share some of the most promising and exciting young bowed string players I’ve worked with over the last three years and during lockdown. There are so many young musicians being innovative, explorative and working hard in the folk scene and these are just a few of them.”
Sam’s commitment to teaching and supporting young musicians to develop beyond his role as former Artistic Director of the Ensemble is obvious: “Lockdown has given me lots more time to dedicate to teaching and I’ve enjoyed the opportunity to mentor and be a sounding board for young musicians, as well as helping them to develop their own technique and personal style.”
Here we hear from the four string players – Rosa Pollard Smith (fiddle), Owen Spafford (fiddle), Phoebe Harty (cello) and Alex Lord (fiddle) – about their experiences of the National Youth Folk Ensemble and what they do in the rest of their musical lives. We also catch up with Louis Campbell, another former member of the Ensemble, who now plays in Sam’s band.
Rosa Pollard Smith (fiddle)
I’ve been part of the National Youth Folk Ensemble for the past three years. In that time, I’ve met some of my best friends, been taught by an absolutely incredible tutor team and played gigs at some of the best folk festivals and venues in the country. It’s been an absolute dream!
I absolutely loved playing at Cambridge Folk Festival in my first year. I had never been to a big festival before and to open the main stage was a totally surreal experience. There was so much energy on the stage and we all put our whole hearts into the music. I remember us all coming off stage with the biggest smiles - it was such a positive atmosphere to be in. We spent the rest of the day walking round the festival watching our favourite artists. I never wanted that day to end!
The Ensemble has given me so much! It’s been a really unique opportunity to meet so many people my age with a real passion for folk music. It’s so great to be in such a supportive environment where everyone takes music seriously but with such an emphasis on having fun and creating something you love.
There’s so much about folk music that makes it special. Playing by ear lets you embody the tunes and allows you to focus on groove and conveying emotion. It gives you real freedom to create something individual and spontaneous. The musical dialogue between musicians is one of my favourite things in folk. We have this idea in the Ensemble of putting our ears in the middle of the room when you’re playing so that your primary focus isn’t just on what you are playing, but the overall sound. You have to ensure that what you’re doing contributes to the music as a whole. I really love that it’s such a joint effort.
For me, manuscripts are where it really hits me how the music we’re playing is part of such an old tradition. Maybe some of the tunes haven’t been played for hundreds of years and the people who played them and wrote them down are long gone. But the music has been immortalised in these manuscripts and now I’m playing it and hopefully people will continue to play it when I’m long gone. I feel like manuscripts allow you to continue the tradition in a really personal and freeing way. You get to interpret the speed, groove and overall feeling of the tune in a way that can be totally individual to you. Sometimes I’ll play the tunes exactly how they’re written but other times I’ll tweak them or maybe give them a full makeover, until they’re just how I like them and feel like I can connect with them the most.
During lockdown, I’ve been having lessons with Sam Sweeney on Zoom and it’s been great to be able to focus on folk music as I’ve never had a regular folk teacher before. He’s super supportive and inspiring and is always coming up with new and fun ways to take my playing up a level. We’ve talked about different grooves in tunes such as jigs and 3/2 hornpipes, talked about conveying emotion and communicating through music and worked on other broader skills like transposition and accompanying.
I have also been a member of Sage Gateshead based youth folk group Folkestra as well as learning both violin and flute classically at their Centre for Advanced Training. I also go to the Folkworks Tuesdays classes where I learn clog dancing and have been part of the folk choir. More recently, I’ve been sitting in on one of the fiddle classes to learn a bit about teaching and I got to lead a couple of classes myself, which was a great experience.
This is my last year as part of the National Youth Folk Ensemble as I made the really tough decision not to re-audition. I hope to get involved with the alumni programme, teaching in schools and continuing to play together when it becomes possible again. Folk music and the people I have met during my time in the Ensemble will always be a huge part of my life!
Owen Spafford (fiddle)
I auditioned for the first cohort when I was 14 – only just within the age bracket – and I was so happy to be invited to join. I remember being really excited and more than a little bit nervous as fellow Leeds musician Martin Parker and I went down on the train to our first residential. We met several of the other members as they got on the same train down to Taunton. Turns out young folkies are quite easy to spot! That first residential, in the beautiful Halsway Manor, was one of the best musical experiences I’ve had.
For the three years I was a member, I would look forward to the residentials as the best parts of the year – playing tunes, seeing friends and gigging. I particularly enjoyed playing at the Sage Gateshead with Cohort 2. We really gelled as a band and the audience were so lovely.
The Ensemble has really shaped the way I approach all aspects of playing and listening to music. I learnt a lot from one-to-one lessons with amazing fiddlers like Sam, Emma Reid and Miranda Rutter, as well as playing with the other members. I’ve also met some really great friends and have started a couple of bands with Ensemble bandmates. I love the tunes and grooves and the fact that folk music is so much about sharing music and dance with everybody.
Since leaving the Ensemble, I’ve joined the National Youth Orchestra as a composer. I’d been studying violin and composition at the Junior RNCM for a couple of years and had become really interested in composition. It was quite a change going from a totally oral music tradition with a group of 18 musicians to an orchestra of 170 musicians all playing from from notated scores. It’s been a really enjoyable learning curve, navigating the worlds of improvisation, notation and the inbetween. I’m very much influenced by the approach to music taught within the National Youth Folk Ensemble and traditional music as a whole but more recently I’ve loved exploring the freedoms and sounds that notated music offers.
In lockdown I’ve been employed by the Irish Arts Foundation UK to make radio shows on the Leeds-Irish community and Irish traditional music as a whole, using a combination of oral history and musical interviews as well as field and commercial recordings. The shows have been broadcast on local FM radio at East Leeds FM. So far we’ve had a great mix of interviewees including Danny Diamond, Martin Hayes, Karen Tweed, Mik Artistik and more.
It was really good fun to record some tunes for Sam’s gig, I hope you enjoy!
Phoebe Harty (cello)
I have been in the Ensemble playing cello since it started in 2016. It’s such an incredible part of my life. Before I started the Ensemble, I loved playing cello but it wasn’t a passion that I wanted to spend all my time doing. Being in the Ensemble has really brought that out and made me absolutely fall in love with it. It’s opened my eyes to the world of arranging tunes and finding tunes in manuscripts and all these other things that I hadn’t experienced before. I’ve got a lot socially out of it – so many friends to play music with all over the country and really good connections with the tutors as well. It’s incredible the people we get to work with and spend so much time learning from. “I just have the best time every residential! I really like hanging out with people in that space and having my mind actively engaged in working on this music and playing it with these people. The opportunities are just endless.
I have a whole bank of incredible memories. At the very first residential, the first evening session, sitting in a room in Halsway Manor and playing tunes with people wanting to play for the same reasons that I did, really listening to and appreciating each other. I hadn’t really been in a session like that before and it was a bit of a mind-blowing moment.
I love that folk music brings people together. I think it’s an incredible enabler for people to be creative and express how they are feeling or just have a great time together. I love how it encompasses so much - the dances and stories from all different times in history. It’s beautiful and I love how it’s quite often made up of very simple melodies that are very accessible. Everyone wants to help you, the older people want to pass the tradition on to younger people. It’s a very inclusive, lovely thing to be part of and to spend your time doing.
I study classical cello at the Junior RNCM programme on Saturdays, which is great fun. It was kind of scary because I come from a folk background but it’s a really great thing to do alongside folk music I think, to get to know the instrument. I’m in a couple of bands, I play in my local county orchestra, and I play at a Music for All North West session where people of all different abilities get together and play folk music.
I also go to fiddle camps. Alasdair Fraser and Natalie Haas run loads around the world and I’ve been to quite a few of them. I’m also starting to learn how to play for dancing and next I’d like to get more into the Euro-dance scene.
I have found lockdown to be a really beneficial thing for my creative thinking. I have spent a lot time playing because of all the extra time at home, and through that I’ve become really interested in the emotion in music, how the early humans used music to communicate before spoken language developed, and how to be more expressive in music. It’s really helped my playing and my concept of music and my understanding of the purpose of it as a tool for empathy. Especially in this time, people need the arts to give them a bit of hope and I think music is such a great tool for that. I’ve realised how much of a role it plays in the happiness of everyone.”
Alex Lord (fiddle)
I joined in 2016 in the first cohort and I ended up staying in for three years. Being around professional musicians like Sam Sweeney and Emma Reid is a really good thing. I benefitted from the tuition, the group workshops, and learning how to be a professional session musician.
I have loads of great memories. In Year 2, at the last residential we had a final session outside looking at the sunset and everyone was really emotional. It was a nice end to a really lovely year together.
Some of my closest friends are from the Ensemble so it’s been a really good thing for me and I now have lots of musicians to work with in the future. It led to the formation of a six-piece band made up of Ensemble members – Don’t Feed the Peacocks.
Since I left the Ensemble I’ve mostly been gigging with Don’t Feed the Peacocks and we were nominated for the BBC Radio 2 Young Folk Award. We’ve had some gigs cancelled with Covid but we’ve had the chance to rehearse and make a music video. Last year, some of us went to Albania to share our music and a lot of the things we were taught through the Ensemble, and they shared their culture with us.
I love folk music partly because it runs through my family but also the rawness of it. It feels natural and stripped back. Such beautiful music can be made with simple arrangements and so few instruments.
I’m currently studying Professional Sound and Video Technology at Salford University and I’ve been involved with some projects with the National Youth Folk Ensemble alumni. The first thing we did was the Manchester project in September last year. There were ten of us and we got together and rearranged some of our old pieces for the smaller group and we got some individual help from Sam Sweeney if needed. We performed at the Royal Northern College of Music and got a good crowd, and we also led a workshop for music teachers. In January this year we went to Hope in Derbyshire and spent a day organising workshops for young people who are new to folk music. We thought about what to teach them and individual things we could talk to them about. We then went to a local school and performed as a group and individually, and led some workshops. It was good to get paid for these.
Louis Campbell (guitar)
I was a part of the first two cohorts of the National Youth Folk Ensemble when I was 16 to 18. Since then I have done a couple of alumni projects and have continued playing music with lots of people I met in the Ensemble.
Cambridge Folk Festival in Year Two was an extremely special day, the gig went really well and the audience seemed to enjoy it on a musical level far deeper than just being pleased to see young people playing folk music. It felt very much like a culmination of the sound and community we developed over the first two years and it was an amazingly rewarding musical experience.
I think it is very easy for a young musician to mask their musical insecurities with flashy playing and to be attracted to certain styles which are able to be appreciated on quite a shallow emotional level, myself very, very much included, it is a very normal and common phenomenon which people slowly grow out of as they get older. The unusual thing about the National Youth Folk Ensemble to me, thanks to the influence of tutors like Rob Harbon, Miranda Rutter, Ben Nicholls and Emma Reid (for example!! there are so many!!) is that it provides direct access to extremely mature and considered musical minds you wouldn’t encounter just being around other young musicians and has helped me and lots of other members begin to grapple with this far younger than I believe we otherwise would have. The other huge thing for me was getting to meet lots of incredible young musicians who have influenced me musically and as a person. In such a niche world, geography plays an inevitable and unfortunate role in who we mix with so the Ensemble bringing people together from all over the country has meant a huge amount to me.
Since the Ensemble, I have done two years at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester studying classical guitar. I have done everything from musical pit band gigs, to big bands, to depping in alt. rock bands to playing banjo for Rhapsody in Blue. I learn a lot from every different thing I do so it has been great (if occasionally exhausting!). I have continued making my own music which despite being not particularly folky is hugely influenced by everything I learnt in the Ensemble. Folk wise I have played a lot in a duo I have with Owen Spafford which has very wide boundaries allowing us to explore whatever we feel like so is really rewarding. I have also been lucky enough to have lessons with Martin Simpson and Kris Drever, both hugely wise musical minds who I have learnt a huge amount from.
It has been a really amazing and unexpected experience playing in Sam Sweeney’s band. Just being in a room with these people teaches you so much, I am so grateful for it. Sam wanted to make a big sounding band record with Jack Rutter and Ben Nicholls. He had made really detailed demos for all the tunes, a lot of which had archtop electric guitar parts and textures. Out of the blue he sent me early versions of Maid of the Mill and Red to add some ideas to. That grew into the idea of coming to add some overdubs and then somehow grew into being in the band. My two biggest musical loves have always been folk tune music and Post-Rock (Mogwai, Sigur Ros, Bon Iver etc.) so getting to combine my love of effects pedals, drones and builds with the things I learnt being part of an unusual two folk guitar unit with Kerran Cotterell in the National Youth Folk Ensemble has been a complete dream come true.
We recorded the album in live takes over four days last September and then a couple of days of overdubs with Sam, Dave Mackay (an incredible keyboard player) and myself last October, with both sessions helmed by Andy Bell. The album came out at the start of lockdown scuppering touring and promotion plans.
For this gig, it was lovely to be back at Cecil Sharp House for the first time since I played there with the National Youth Folk Ensemble. We were all talking about how much of a home or control centre it feels like. It's a very special place. It was great to give some of the arrangements some air and to begin to let them find how they want to sit as live rather than recorded music. I hope we get to play there in front of real people one day soon! I'm very excited about Rosa, Phoebe, Alex and Owen's involvement as well. Sam is incredibly dedicated to helping young people in folk music, it is something that is very inspiring to see and we are all very grateful for.
Watch the gig on Facebook or YouTube on Thursday 27 August 2020 at 7.30pm