January 27, 2005

Mostly String Band ventures into bluegrass and beyond

By Lauren Heaton

When 70-something Fran LaSalle, who’s played the recorder and mandolin for most of her life, says she’s never played in a group quite like the Mostly String Band, one can guess the group is a shade unusual.

LaSalle plays with a group of students from the -Antioch School, McKinney Middle and YSHS as well as other adults. They play Celtic and Klezmer music, the tunes of Americana and any other music those in the group feel like playing.

Yvonne Wingard, a music teacher and orchestra director at Yellow Springs High School and the McKinney School, started the band because she wanted a change from the classical music she spends most of the day teaching. A bunch of bluegrass fiddlers was what she had in mind at first, she said. But when she put the call out for musicians and got responses from a wide range of people with diverse musical taste and talent, she said, she realized that musicians of any age, playing any kind of instrument, with a penchant for any type of music, could make a perfectly good sound together.

So instead of seasoned fiddlers playing bluegrass, her musicians range from 10-year-old beginners to semiprofessional elders playing Celtic, Klezmer and Americana on the mandolin, guitar, harp, fiddle, bass and recorder, an unconventional if promising combination of talent and sound.

The Mostly String Band will perform this Saturday, Jan. 29, at 8 p.m., at the WEB Coffeehouse in the basement of the Presbyterian Church.

Though it wasn’t what Wingard had planned, the Mostly String Band, which also boasts three banjos purchased with a $500 grant from the Yellow Springs Endowment for Education, has its appeal as an eclectic group of 10 to 15 people who have in common a love of music. LaSalle, who has always played with dulcimer and early music groups, said she wanted a chance to play a different style of music.

“The fun in playing music is playing with others,” she said. “If you enjoy music, almost any genre can be fun.”

The Mostly String Band offers 10-year-old Quinn Leventhal, who plays the fiddle, a chance to use his violin in a new way that allows him to play fast, then faster and faster. Quinn, a fifth-grade student at the Antioch School, played classical violin mostly by himself before joining the band, which offers camaraderie and a nonclassical venue to sling his strings.

YSHS student and fiddle player Meg Hild grew up playing bluegrass music, but she had never played Celtic tunes with a group outside her family before the Mostly Strings, she said. She never relied on sheet music, playing mostly by ear, and finds the Mostly String Band just right for her fine senses and lack of conventional notation.

Michael Hitchcock has played the mandolin and mandola semiprofessionally in the Miami Valley for 20 years, but he also likes the freedom of playing rhythm guitar with the Mostly Strings.

“The band is a low-pressure kind of gig, and the fun of it is more the spontaneity,” Hitchcock said.

When the Mostly Strings get together, they read a line of music, chords and a rhythm, and they repeat it with degrees of improvisation tacked on for variation. The music they will perform this weekend is Celtic and Americana, but they are open to playing whatever band members suggest, Wingard said.

The band rehearses in the YSHS music room on Tuesdays and Wednesdays at 3:30 p.m. and Saturdays at 1 p.m. Anyone interested in joining should call Yvonne Wingard at YSHS, 767-7224.