PLAY / SING / DANCE / COSPLAY for CREDIT and for FUN with the Tech Folk Orchestra & the Eternal Stalwarts Orchestra!
The Tech Folk Orchestra (MUEN3310-204) is recruiting for Spring 2025! Seeking singers, players, dancers, cosplayers, gamers, coders, LARPers, actors, and designers. Come and play with us in the Multiverse of Bassanda!
Open to participants from across the TTU campus
ACTIVE ALLIES to LGBTQIA, AAPI, BIPOC, women-identifying, and related minoritized communities
Web: http://www.eternalstalwartsorchestra.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/eternalstalwartsorchestra
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stories/highlights/17912953315134161/
Facebook “Event” at: https://fb.me/e/8t6IvyEFz
The Tech Folk Orchestra (http://eternalstalwartsorchestra.org is a medium ensemble (winds, brass, strings, percussion, voice, dance) specializing in group performance of various music and dance traditions that have been historically learned by ear and held in the memory, focused upon but not limited to musics of northwestern Europe and the Americas. TFO began as a small group (“the Tech Folk Orchestra”) playing traditional instruments of the Celtic world (flute, fiddle, guitar, mandolin, tin whistle, and so forth), but has expanded over the years due to increased interest from a wider diversity of instrumentalists and singers. Because many of those interested to participate are winds or brass specialists who do not have the hours or years available to learn a traditional instrument, TFO’s repertoire and orchestrational choices have expanded to accommodate this wider diversity.
Currently, the ensemble includes winds, brass, strings, percussion, SATB vocals, and dancers; the repertoire is founded in the most traditional folkloric sources, from within and beyond northern and western Europe, but is arranged for the one-to-a-part chamber orchestration and sight-reading capacities of the expanded ensemble. TFO is a particularly good situation for players, at a range of skill levels, who will benefit from experience at: playing by ear, playing from memory, playing dance music rhythms with authentic and effective feel, exploring related instruments or performance modes (e.g., singing or dancing), playing with a full rhythm section, “head” arrangements, and related “bandstand” skills. Participants are also encouraged to employ instruments used in these musics, of which the VMC holds a small collection, and in appropriate languages insofar as possible; opportunities for learning associated dances are also available. Presents three recital concerts per academic year, in addition to other service as part of SOM and Vernacular Music Center events (especially the Solstice Celebration each December) as required.
In addition, the TFO collaborates widely with fellow artists, and with organizations across and beyond the TTU campus, including TTU Theatre & Dance, the historic Wallace Theater in Levelland Texas, the Louise Hays Underwood Center for the Arts, Lubbock-Con, and a range of other arts and advocacy organizations. The TFO also has an “alternate history” alter ego, the “house band” of the Bassanda Multiverse (link), and engages with cosplay, speculative fiction, historical role-playing games, and more.
Director, Dr. Christopher Smith
Email: christopher.smith@ttu.edu
Recent concert performance: https://youtu.be/Ez19hapEptg?t=3207
PBS television special: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sHIe7EoKi8M
The Eternal Stalwarts Orchestra: Symphonic folk from a lost world
Major inspiration for the Eternal Stalwarts Orchestra, the “big band” version of the Tech Folk Orchestra, comes from the fictional country of “Bassanda,” a creation of Taos-based musicians and VMC partners Chipper Thompson (chipperthompson.com) and Roger Landes (rogerlandes.com), who for purposes of our January 2014 debut assumed their Bassanda personae (“The Rev” and “The General”) as guest performers. We imagined the fictional “Eternal Stalwarts Orchestra,” in which, as part of an “alternate-history” frame, it’s alleged that a Soviet satellite’s official state folkloric ensemble (the “Bassanda National Radio Orchestra”) mutates, after the fall of Communism, into a free-lance ensemble engaged in a Never-Ending Tour.
The BNRO/ESO has thus been heard in many permutations and with widely variegated personnel, including “The Classic 1952 Band,” “The 1962 ‘Beatnik’ Band” (which nearly appeared on the cover of Life magazine under the headline “New Currents from Behind the Iron Curtain”), “The 1965 Newport Folk Festival Band,” who helped jump-start Bob Dylan’s notorious switch from acoustic folk to electric rock & roll, “The Mysterious 1885 Victorian “Steampunk” Band, “The Post-Apocalyptic ‘Desert Pirates’ Band,” “The 1912 New Orleans Creole “Voodoo” Band,” the “1928 ‘Carnivale Incognito’ Band,” the 1934 “Intergalactic Pandemic Popular Front Band,” “The 1936 International Brigade Libertarias Band,” “The 1942 Casablanca Band,” and “The 1948 Berlin Noir Band.”
Coming in 2024-25: “Babylon Berlin Ragamuffin Band”
Director: Dr Christopher J Smith (https://www.depts.ttu.edu/music/aboutus/faculty/chris-j-smith.php)
A series of short films featuring the ESO: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLKXR86U6wxeWw2K0tGjmaq425te7QUCsH
Rehearsals and performances at TTU SOM (LBK campus).
First tutti meeting Sunday January 26 5-7pm room M011 (“West Hall”) in the TTU School of Music
Admission by interview/audition.
Contact Dr Smith (christopher.smith@ttu.edu) for more information.
