TURNER — Una Shostak has been performing Irish music with her father, Anthony, for four years. The 9-year-old said she still gets a little nervous between songs.
“Dad’s there so he covers up all the mistakes with the bagpipes,” she said.
“Except my own,” he corrected.
“What mistakes?” She’s sweet, sincere.
“Trust me, they’re in there,” he said.
The father-daughter duo from Greene, she on the fiddle, he on the uilleann pipes, played at the Turner Public Library weekly last fall to bring attention to its likely only-one-in-the-state musical instrument lending library.
Live in Turner? Any desire to check out and learn the bodhran? That’s an Irish drum.
You, too, could become a member of Maine’s surprisingly happening Irish music scene.
Una started playing when she was 4, first on a fiddle, then piano, then, in the past year, harp.
The harp is pretty important in Irish music, she said. “It’s on the flag and it’s the national instrument.” Plus: “The harp just sounds nice, and it’s graceful.”
Anthony started playing his Irish bagpipes about 20 years ago after discovering the sound on records as a kid.
“This instrument was on some of those recordings and I’d never heard it before. ‘What’s that sound? It’s not a guitar, it’s not a violin,'” he said. “When I figured out what it was, I couldn’t find them anywhere. You’d go to a music store and say you want uilleann pipes and they’d think you belong at the hardware store.”
Through the contradance scene in Portland, he met a stranger who happily loaned him a spare set while he got on a builder’s waiting list.
A detailed photo shows the hand-pumped bellows of Anthony Shostak’s unique looking Irish instrument called uilleann pipes. (Sun Journal photo by Russ Dillingham)
“Weirdly, Maine has a pretty high concentration of uilleann pipers,” Anthony said. “We have a pipemaker in the state, Bruce Childress down in Kennebunk, and then there’s a whole bunch of players, which is kind of crazy, considering as late as the 1980s this instrument almost went extinct — both the knowledge to make them and knowledge to make the reeds had almost died. There were only a few people building them at the time. It really was with the birth of the internet that things really started to take off again.”
He works at Bates College and plays a number of other instruments including the banjo and didgeridoo.
Watching the pair play an Irish polka — “Polkas are big in Ireland, especially in County Kerry. You wouldn’t think it, right?” quips Anthony — the music is happy and fast.
His right elbow works the pipe’s bellows and it almost looks as though he’s playing a flute, fingers flying, without ever bringing the instrument to his mouth.
They play in public as they’re invited and at home a lot. Their next scheduled performance is May 3 during a Turner Public Library fundraiser.
Una is working on building up her finger strength so she can play her harp loud and fast enough to accompany her father’s bagpipes in public.
“We’re athletes of the little muscles,” Anthony said.
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