Practising, Listening, Performing with Liz Knowles

Practising, Listening, Performing with Liz Knowles

  • Mon 31 May, Tues 1 June & Wed 2 June, 11am–12:30pm
  • €30
  • Zoom
Liz Knowles
Taking Charge of your Performance Career 2021: Join Liz Knowles online for a set of three interactive Zoom workshops for professional musicians working in all genres.

Internationally-renowned fiddle player Liz Knowles will deliver three workshops exploring innovative approaches to practise, how listening skills can inform your musical career, and how to design and deliver inspiring performances. Musicians will gain an insight into Liz’s career and artistic approach, and will have the opportunity to ask questions and learn from one of folk music’s greatest performers, arrangers and educators.

Ticket price: €30 for three workshops

Please note, this is a professional development course for professional musicians working in all genres. Ticket holders must be available to attend all 3 workshops. Places are limited to 30.

Workshop 1: Pushing the Refresh Button on Practise

Monday 31 May 11am – 12.30pm

Practise is the art of making choices. We might arrive into practise with the goal of building repertoire, technique, and skill, but away from the practise room the only thing that matters is how we express those things. How do you make practise more than a boring set of rules and exercises? How do you translate the details of practise into the wider panorama of expression? This session will explore how to make the choices that can turn practise into a compelling part of your musical journey—the line which connects your past, present, and future as a musician.

Workshop 2: Lend an Ear

Tuesday 1 June 11am – 12.30pm

In Irish music, listening is vital for how we learn tunes and style. On a deeper level, it can be the vehicle by which we come to understand elements of musicianship like intonation, technique, and musical expression. There are deep implications for listening in traditional music—as in all music. This session will explore new ways to approach listening in your practise and in teaching, how to apply it in recording and performance, and even how it can inform and inspire your composition and arrangement skills.

Workshop 3: The Many Stages of Performance

Wednesday 2 June 11am – 12.30pm

Performance can take place in a surprisingly wide range of venues and formats—pub and house concerts, sessions and festivals, performing arts centres and touring stage shows, television, radio, film and the recording studio. In this session, Liz will share thoughts on how to design concerts and performances—whatever the venue—from a musical and logistical standpoint while at the same time attending to your development as an artist. She will also share the pivotal moments in her career that have shaped her approach, and ideas on what the future of performance might look like after the pandemic and beyond.

Practising, Listening, Performing with Liz Knowles

Liz Knowles has brought the fire and finesse of her distinctive sound on the fiddle to audiences around the world. Her auspicious beginnings as the fiddler for Riverdance in the 1990s and as soloist on the soundtrack for the film Michael Collins established her as a virtuosic and versatile performer. As a soloist, Liz has appeared at The Kennedy Center, in The Pirate Queen on Broadway, with The New York Pops at Carnegie Hall, and on tour with Don Henley. In collaborative settings, she currently performs with The Martin Hayes Quartet, all-female fiddle supergroup String Sisters, and her trio, Open the Door for Three.

The melding of thirty years of playing Irish traditional music with her experiences in classical music (Marcus Roberts, the Bang-on-a-Can Orchestra, Bobby McFerrin, Paula Cole, Steve Reich, Eliot Goldenthal, and Rachel Barton) has empowered Liz to greatly expand the horizons of her musical expression. In addition to live performance, her career includes arranging, composing, recording, producing, and musical direction for the stage. Her compositions and arrangements of tunes and songs have been recorded and performed by John Whelan, Flook, Chicago’s Metropolis Symphony Orchestra, Liz Carroll, Beolach, J.P. Cormier, Bachue, John Doyle, Ensemble Galilei, and Martin Hayes, among many others.

Liz is a highly sought-after educator, currently on the faculty of the Department of Contemporary Improvisation at New England Conservatory in Boston. She also conducts her own private studio, and is a regular teacher at many music festivals and workshops across the US and in Ireland. Most recently, Liz created an hour-long audio journal in words and music about the experiences of musicians during the pandemic, published in a special issue of the journal 'Critical Studies in Improvisation' (University of Guelph, Canada).

Liz is a co-founder of the Sustainable Touring Arts Coalition (STAC), which aims to support environmental sustainability in the music industry. She is currently taking advantage of the pause in tour-related travel during the pandemic to finish work on two ongoing book projects.

This three-part series with Liz Knowles is part of Taking Charge of Your Performance Career 2021, Music Network's online professional development series for musicians working in all genres. This is just one of a number of ways in which Music Network will support musicians throughout the year.

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