STAFF
Chris Smith, Founding Director
Dr Christopher J. Smith ([email protected]) is Professor and Chair of Musicology and founding director of the Vernacular Music Center at the Texas Tech University School of Music. He holds the Bachelor of Arts (Music, Summa Cum Laude) from the University of Massachusetts at Boston, and a Master’s in Music (Jazz, Magna Cum Laude) and Ph.D. in Musicology (with high distinction) from the Indiana University School of Music. At Indiana, he was the 1997 recipient of the John H. Edwards Fellowship and the 1998 recipient of the Walter Kaufmann Musicology Prize. His principle professors at Indiana were J. Peter Burkholder, Thomas Mathiesen, Austin B. Caswell, Richard Bauman, David N. Baker, and Ruth Stone.
At Texas Tech, he has been the recipient of the TTU Alumni Association’s New Faculty Award (2003) and the “Professing Excellence” award (2005 & 2009), election to the TTU Teaching Academy (2006), the Texas Tech President’s Excellence in Teaching Award (2010), election to the TTU Institute for Inclusive Excellence (2011), the TTU Office of International Affairs’ Global Vision Lifetime Achievement Award (2011), the Barnie E Rushing Faculty Distinguished Research Award (2015), and the Faculty Book Award (2015). He is a fellow of TTU’s Engaged and Integrated Scholars program and of the TTU Institute for Inclusive Excellence.
He has taught at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Indiana University, and as a guest lecturer at University College Cork, the University of Limerick, and the Dundalk Institute of Technology; in summer 2015 he served as lecturer at CESMECA graduate school in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.
He teaches courses in American, 20th century, and African Diasporic musics, as well as vernacular, world music, and ethnomusicology topics, intercultural learning, and community arts entrepreneurship. His research interests are in American and African-American Music, 20th Century Music, oral-tradition music and dance idioms, improvisation, music and politics, and performance practice.
In addition to the Vernacular Music Center, he directs the Roots Music Institute (a 501c3 organization), and served as faculty adviser for the Tech Irish Set-Dancers, Caprock English Country Dancers, and Caprock Morris Border dance team. From 2009-12 he served as External Examiner for the BA program in Traditional Music and Dance at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, and continues service as External Examiner for PhD dissertations at institutions in the USA, UK, Ireland, and the EU, and for the Irish government’s music program accreditation bureau. In 2015 he completed a second two-year term as President of the American Musicological Society – Southwest regional chapter.
He is the author of Celtic Backup for All Instrumentalists, “The Celtic Guitar” (in The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar), “Miles Davis and the Semiotics of Improvised Performance” (in Improvisation: In the Course of Performance), “Trusting the Tradition: The Meaning of the Irish Session Workshop” (in Proceedings of the VIIth International Symposium on Cultural Diversity in Music Education: The Local and the Global), “Identities, Contexts, and Gender in the Irish Musical Landscape” (in Irish Studies: Geographies and Gender), “Gaelic and Continental Musical Interaction in Early Modern Ireland” (in The Renaissance in Ireland), “Cinematic Constructions of Irish Musical Identity” (in Popular Culture and Postmodern Ireland), “Papa Legba and the Liminal Spaces of the Blues” (in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary), “Blacks and Irish on the Riverine Frontiers" (in Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers), "Randy Newman and the Narrative Resonance of the Past: Historiography in 'Louisiana 1927,' in Popular Music and Society, and a variety of other essays and book chapters. His scholarly monograph The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Illinois), published in September 2013, won the 2015 Irwin F Lowens Award from the Society for American Music; Dale Cockrell (Demons of Disorder: Blackface Minstrels and Their World) called it "A dazzling addition to the literature on American popular music and its history." His new book project is Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (Illinois, 2019), which dance scholar Julie Malnig (Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader) calls “A very ambitious and impressive study [whose] breadth and scope…are remarkable” and which is “highly recommended” by Thomas DeFrantz (Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African-American Dance).
He has published articles in College Music Symposium, New Hibernia Review, T.D.R. The Drama Review, R.P.M. (Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music), Early Music America, Music in Art, Contemporary Music Review, the Journal of American Folklore, Southern Culture, Early Music (London), Irish Music, Historical Performance, Piping Today, American Music, The Journal of Music in Ireland, The Tallgrass Journal, and the Journal of the Vernacular Music Center, reviews in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of American History, and chapters on music in The World and Its Peoples, The Encyclopedia of Franco-American Relations, and the Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland.
He has presented papers at the national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the American Musicological Society, College Music Society, the International Society for the Study of Popular Music, the Narrative Society, the American Council for Irish Studies, the Film and History Society, the Stage and Screen Conference, the Southern American Studies Association, the Music and the Moving Image Conference, and the LYRICA Society for Text and Music Studies. He has chaired sessions at University College Cork, Scoil Samraidh Willie Clancy in County Clare, the University of Limerick, and the Popular Culture Association; originated and chaired the First Annual Texas Tech Fine Arts Colloquium and the TTU Arts Practice Research conference, and has presented papers internationally at the International Council for Traditional Music (Dundalk), at the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference (Glasgow), the School of African and Oriental Studies (London), Texas Music Educators Association (San Antonio), Hearing Landscape Critically: Sense, Text, Ideology (Oxford), the North Atlantic Fiddle Conference (Derry), Dance Music Research Forum (Donegal), Music and Migration (Southampton), Representing Ireland (Newcastle), the Society for Musicology in Ireland (Derry), the Council for Cultural Diversity in Music Education (Brisbane), the International Meetings of the Council for Irish Studies (Liverpool), the International Ballad Conference (Netherlands), the International Council for the Study of Traditional Music (Newfoundland), the North Atlantic Fiddle Conference (Derry-Donegal), Dance Music Research Forum (Limerick), the UCCB Storytelling Symposium (Nova Scotia), the Biennial Conference on Music in the 19th Century (Cardiff), the Conference on Arts & Society (Budapest), the Internacional Federation for Theatre Research (Barcelona), History – Analysis – Pedagogy / Music Analysis Conference (Nottingham), Decolonizing Music – COMTA (San Juan PR), the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery, the Dance Studies Association, and Analyser les Processus de Création Musicale 2013 (Montreal). He has designed and created World Wide Web content for Prentice-Hall’s music history textbook series, for the Buddy Holly Center, and for www.banjosessions.com.
In addition, he records and tours internationally with Altramar medieval music ensemble (7 CDs to date on the Dorian Group label, with concerts throughout North America, Canada, Holland, Ireland, Germany, and Austria) and with RattleSkull (Euro-French Balfolk dance music), leads the Irish traditional band Last Night’s Fun (with TTU Professor Angela Mariani) and the Juke Band (pre-WWII blues and jazz), directs the Texas Tech University Celtic Ensemble and the Elegant Savages Orchestra, has lectured or performed at hundreds of colloquia, concerts, workshops, and pub sessions across the Continent and in Europe, and on National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, and the Fox Network nationwide, and in 2005 released a solo CD of Irish traditional music. His disc with Last Night’s Fun is Johnny Faa, a program of songs and tunes in the Irish tradition. He has written liner notes for Dorian Group, Ltd., for Naxos World, and for independent CD releases and served as columnist for www.irishmusic.com. He was the traditional-music consultant for noted composer Dan Welcher’s Minstrels of the Kells and performed at its TTU premiere and on an Olympic tour of mainland China, directs the annual Caprock Celtic Christmas at Texas Tech, formerly served on the International Advisory Board for the Naxos World record label and Flatlands Dance Theatre, and currently serves on the boards of Supporters of Fine Arts and Caprock Early Music. He is co-Director of the TTU Symposium of World Musics and Southwest Early Music, serves as informal consultant to the Society for Ethnomusicology and to the Buddy Holly Center educational program, and is a founding staff member of ZoukFest, the world’s only music camp and festival for players of the Irish bouzouki.
He is the composer, librettist, and musical director of the full-length theatrical dance show Dancing at the Crossroads: A Celebration of African American and Anglo-Celtic Dance in the New World, which premiered in February 2013; the “folk oratorio” Plunder: Battling for Democracy in the New World (2016); and the full-length immersive theatrical show Yonder, a collaboration with the historic Wallace Theater in Levelland, TX (2020). His original scores for the TTU Theater & Dance department’s productions of Brecht’s Mother Courage, Our Country’s Good, and (in collaboration with Roger Landes) Much Ado About Nothing three times received the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival’s Meritorious Achievement Award. He is also the founder and music director of the Elegant Savages Orchestra, a "symphonic folk" ensemble performing Dr Smith's orchestral arrangements of folk and traditional musics. His co-composed original chamber-orchestral score for the classic silent horror film Nosferatu (1922) was commissioned by the Flatland Film Festival in 2015. He serves as a “lead artist,” music director, and house composer for the Bassanda Project, a movement & music collaboration with modern dance choreographer Nicole Wesley (Texas State University).
As an instrumentalist, he concertizes on Irish bouzouki, tenor banjo, button accordion, slide guitar, saz, lute, gittern, Turkish lavta, and percussion. He is also a former nightclub bouncer, line cook, carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck, and a published poet.
To contact Christopher Smith, email [email protected].
Dr Smith TEDx talk on "The Old Ways"
At Texas Tech, he has been the recipient of the TTU Alumni Association’s New Faculty Award (2003) and the “Professing Excellence” award (2005 & 2009), election to the TTU Teaching Academy (2006), the Texas Tech President’s Excellence in Teaching Award (2010), election to the TTU Institute for Inclusive Excellence (2011), the TTU Office of International Affairs’ Global Vision Lifetime Achievement Award (2011), the Barnie E Rushing Faculty Distinguished Research Award (2015), and the Faculty Book Award (2015). He is a fellow of TTU’s Engaged and Integrated Scholars program and of the TTU Institute for Inclusive Excellence.
He has taught at the University of Massachusetts at Boston and Indiana University, and as a guest lecturer at University College Cork, the University of Limerick, and the Dundalk Institute of Technology; in summer 2015 he served as lecturer at CESMECA graduate school in San Cristóbal de las Casas in Chiapas, Mexico.
He teaches courses in American, 20th century, and African Diasporic musics, as well as vernacular, world music, and ethnomusicology topics, intercultural learning, and community arts entrepreneurship. His research interests are in American and African-American Music, 20th Century Music, oral-tradition music and dance idioms, improvisation, music and politics, and performance practice.
In addition to the Vernacular Music Center, he directs the Roots Music Institute (a 501c3 organization), and served as faculty adviser for the Tech Irish Set-Dancers, Caprock English Country Dancers, and Caprock Morris Border dance team. From 2009-12 he served as External Examiner for the BA program in Traditional Music and Dance at the Irish World Academy of Music and Dance at the University of Limerick, and continues service as External Examiner for PhD dissertations at institutions in the USA, UK, Ireland, and the EU, and for the Irish government’s music program accreditation bureau. In 2015 he completed a second two-year term as President of the American Musicological Society – Southwest regional chapter.
He is the author of Celtic Backup for All Instrumentalists, “The Celtic Guitar” (in The Cambridge Companion to the Guitar), “Miles Davis and the Semiotics of Improvised Performance” (in Improvisation: In the Course of Performance), “Trusting the Tradition: The Meaning of the Irish Session Workshop” (in Proceedings of the VIIth International Symposium on Cultural Diversity in Music Education: The Local and the Global), “Identities, Contexts, and Gender in the Irish Musical Landscape” (in Irish Studies: Geographies and Gender), “Gaelic and Continental Musical Interaction in Early Modern Ireland” (in The Renaissance in Ireland), “Cinematic Constructions of Irish Musical Identity” (in Popular Culture and Postmodern Ireland), “Papa Legba and the Liminal Spaces of the Blues” (in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary), “Blacks and Irish on the Riverine Frontiers" (in Rethinking the Irish in the American South: Beyond Rounders and Reelers), "Randy Newman and the Narrative Resonance of the Past: Historiography in 'Louisiana 1927,' in Popular Music and Society, and a variety of other essays and book chapters. His scholarly monograph The Creolization of American Culture: William Sidney Mount and the Roots of Blackface Minstrelsy (Illinois), published in September 2013, won the 2015 Irwin F Lowens Award from the Society for American Music; Dale Cockrell (Demons of Disorder: Blackface Minstrels and Their World) called it "A dazzling addition to the literature on American popular music and its history." His new book project is Dancing Revolution: Bodies, Space, and Sound in American Cultural History (Illinois, 2019), which dance scholar Julie Malnig (Shimmy, Sham, Shake: A Social and Popular Dance Reader) calls “A very ambitious and impressive study [whose] breadth and scope…are remarkable” and which is “highly recommended” by Thomas DeFrantz (Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African-American Dance).
He has published articles in College Music Symposium, New Hibernia Review, T.D.R. The Drama Review, R.P.M. (Journal of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music), Early Music America, Music in Art, Contemporary Music Review, the Journal of American Folklore, Southern Culture, Early Music (London), Irish Music, Historical Performance, Piping Today, American Music, The Journal of Music in Ireland, The Tallgrass Journal, and the Journal of the Vernacular Music Center, reviews in the Journal of the American Musicological Society and the Journal of American History, and chapters on music in The World and Its Peoples, The Encyclopedia of Franco-American Relations, and the Encyclopedia of Music in Ireland.
He has presented papers at the national meetings of the Society for Ethnomusicology, the Society for American Music, the American Musicological Society, College Music Society, the International Society for the Study of Popular Music, the Narrative Society, the American Council for Irish Studies, the Film and History Society, the Stage and Screen Conference, the Southern American Studies Association, the Music and the Moving Image Conference, and the LYRICA Society for Text and Music Studies. He has chaired sessions at University College Cork, Scoil Samraidh Willie Clancy in County Clare, the University of Limerick, and the Popular Culture Association; originated and chaired the First Annual Texas Tech Fine Arts Colloquium and the TTU Arts Practice Research conference, and has presented papers internationally at the International Council for Traditional Music (Dundalk), at the Medieval and Renaissance Studies Conference (Glasgow), the School of African and Oriental Studies (London), Texas Music Educators Association (San Antonio), Hearing Landscape Critically: Sense, Text, Ideology (Oxford), the North Atlantic Fiddle Conference (Derry), Dance Music Research Forum (Donegal), Music and Migration (Southampton), Representing Ireland (Newcastle), the Society for Musicology in Ireland (Derry), the Council for Cultural Diversity in Music Education (Brisbane), the International Meetings of the Council for Irish Studies (Liverpool), the International Ballad Conference (Netherlands), the International Council for the Study of Traditional Music (Newfoundland), the North Atlantic Fiddle Conference (Derry-Donegal), Dance Music Research Forum (Limerick), the UCCB Storytelling Symposium (Nova Scotia), the Biennial Conference on Music in the 19th Century (Cardiff), the Conference on Arts & Society (Budapest), the Internacional Federation for Theatre Research (Barcelona), History – Analysis – Pedagogy / Music Analysis Conference (Nottingham), Decolonizing Music – COMTA (San Juan PR), the Smithsonian Museum’s National Portrait Gallery, the Dance Studies Association, and Analyser les Processus de Création Musicale 2013 (Montreal). He has designed and created World Wide Web content for Prentice-Hall’s music history textbook series, for the Buddy Holly Center, and for www.banjosessions.com.
In addition, he records and tours internationally with Altramar medieval music ensemble (7 CDs to date on the Dorian Group label, with concerts throughout North America, Canada, Holland, Ireland, Germany, and Austria) and with RattleSkull (Euro-French Balfolk dance music), leads the Irish traditional band Last Night’s Fun (with TTU Professor Angela Mariani) and the Juke Band (pre-WWII blues and jazz), directs the Texas Tech University Celtic Ensemble and the Elegant Savages Orchestra, has lectured or performed at hundreds of colloquia, concerts, workshops, and pub sessions across the Continent and in Europe, and on National Public Radio, Minnesota Public Radio, and the Fox Network nationwide, and in 2005 released a solo CD of Irish traditional music. His disc with Last Night’s Fun is Johnny Faa, a program of songs and tunes in the Irish tradition. He has written liner notes for Dorian Group, Ltd., for Naxos World, and for independent CD releases and served as columnist for www.irishmusic.com. He was the traditional-music consultant for noted composer Dan Welcher’s Minstrels of the Kells and performed at its TTU premiere and on an Olympic tour of mainland China, directs the annual Caprock Celtic Christmas at Texas Tech, formerly served on the International Advisory Board for the Naxos World record label and Flatlands Dance Theatre, and currently serves on the boards of Supporters of Fine Arts and Caprock Early Music. He is co-Director of the TTU Symposium of World Musics and Southwest Early Music, serves as informal consultant to the Society for Ethnomusicology and to the Buddy Holly Center educational program, and is a founding staff member of ZoukFest, the world’s only music camp and festival for players of the Irish bouzouki.
He is the composer, librettist, and musical director of the full-length theatrical dance show Dancing at the Crossroads: A Celebration of African American and Anglo-Celtic Dance in the New World, which premiered in February 2013; the “folk oratorio” Plunder: Battling for Democracy in the New World (2016); and the full-length immersive theatrical show Yonder, a collaboration with the historic Wallace Theater in Levelland, TX (2020). His original scores for the TTU Theater & Dance department’s productions of Brecht’s Mother Courage, Our Country’s Good, and (in collaboration with Roger Landes) Much Ado About Nothing three times received the Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival’s Meritorious Achievement Award. He is also the founder and music director of the Elegant Savages Orchestra, a "symphonic folk" ensemble performing Dr Smith's orchestral arrangements of folk and traditional musics. His co-composed original chamber-orchestral score for the classic silent horror film Nosferatu (1922) was commissioned by the Flatland Film Festival in 2015. He serves as a “lead artist,” music director, and house composer for the Bassanda Project, a movement & music collaboration with modern dance choreographer Nicole Wesley (Texas State University).
As an instrumentalist, he concertizes on Irish bouzouki, tenor banjo, button accordion, slide guitar, saz, lute, gittern, Turkish lavta, and percussion. He is also a former nightclub bouncer, line cook, carpenter, lobster fisherman, and oil-rig roughneck, and a published poet.
To contact Christopher Smith, email [email protected].
Dr Smith TEDx talk on "The Old Ways"
Roger Landes, Associate Director
Roger Landes is Professor of Practice at Texas Tech University School of Music. He has a BA (English) from the University of Missouri-Kansas City, an MM (Musicology) from Texas Tech and is finishing a PhD in Fine Arts/Musicology also at TTU. He has twice been the recipient of the Helen DeVitt Jones Excellence in Graduate Teaching Award (2011, 2013). He is the founding director of TTU School of Music’s Balkan Ensemble and has been an interim director (Spring 2012) and assistant director of the school’s Celtic Ensemble (2009-2012).
Since coming to TTU as a grad student in 2009 Landes has been teaching the large enrollment History of Rock and Roll class, which is a perennial favorite with students campus wide.
Prof. Landes’s research interests include American and European traditional music, American popular music, and folk music revival.
Before deciding to devote his energies to teaching full time he had a 30+ year career as a touring performer, recording artist, bandleader, and producer in the field of Irish traditional music, co-founding the critically-acclaimed American Celtic band Scartaglen in 1982. He appeared on the group’s three recordings: Scartaglen (1984), The Middle Path (1987), and Last Night’s Fun (1992).
Scartaglen contributed a track to the best-selling 1993 Narada Records collection Celtic Odyssey, which was on the Billboard charts for almost two years. After Scartaglen disbanded in 1994 he performed in the short-lived quintet Glenfire (1994-1995), which explored the common ground between Irish and Cape Breton traditional musics. From 1995 to 2003 he performed in a duo with singer Connie Dover.
During his years with Scartaglen, Roger established himself as a first-rate accompanist and arranger, and since then has emerged as a master soloist, performing Irish tunes on the bouzouki, mandolin, tenor banjo and guitar with dazzling technical skill and creativity. He is known for his uncanny ability to translate music from the fiddle and the uilleann pipes to fretted string instruments, while retaining the essence of those more traditional instruments.
Roger’s solo CD, Dragon Reels, was recorded in Nashville with Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer Bil VornDick. Released in 1997, it garnered unanimous critical praise.
Roger has produced recordings for Michael Dugger (At Early Dawn), Chris Grotewohl (Under the Influence), Dan Grotewohl (Bear in the Greengrass), Gabriel’s Gate (Departures), and Chris Smith (Coyote Banjo).
The Janissary Stomp, a ground-breaking collection of original bouzouki duets with New Mexico roots musician Chipper Thompson, was released in 2001.
In great demand as a teacher, Roger has been on the staff at the St. Louis Tionól; Catskills Irish Arts Week; Friday Harbor Irish Music Camp; Swannanoa Gathering Celtic Week; Milwaukee Irish Festival Summer School; Seattle Cittern Symposium; Alasdair Fraser’s Valley of the Moon Scottish Fiddle Camp; Music, Arts, and Technology Camp; and the O’Flaherty Irish Music Retreat.
He is the founder and artistic director of ZoukFest, the first international gathering devoted to the Irish bouzouki, which he started in 1998. ZoukFest moved with Roger to Taos, New Mexico in 2001, and since then has grown into a full-fledged world music camp, with the addition of classes for other instruments and vocals, in a range of musical styles. ZoukFest was held at the College of Santa Fe in 2007-8; in 2009-11 it moved to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; as of 2012 it takes place at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design in Santa Fe.
Roger appeared in and contributed to the soundtrack of the 1999 film Ride with the Devil, directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Life of Pi). He has appeared on the National Public Radio shows Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion. In April 2001, his music was featured in a PBS documentary, Last Stand of the Tallgrass Prairie.
In 2002, Roger joined Spanish Galician master musician and Chieftains alumnus Carlos Nuñez on his first US tour. Later that year he toured in a trio with Irish fiddle phenom Frankie Gavin (De Dannan) and harmonica virtuoso Rick Epping (Pumpkinhead, Arcady).
In 2004 he had the pleasure of accompanying legendary Irish fiddler Tommy Peoples (The Bothy Band) for a week of concerts in New Mexico.
In 2007 he completed a short tour with acclaimed Irish fiddler/tenor banjoist John Carty.
Roger performed for several years in a duo with fiddler and guitarist Randal Bays. Their live house concert CD House to House was named one of the Top Five Picks of 2005 by the Irish Times (Dublin).
In 2006 composer Paul Elwood completed a chamber piece for Roger-- In Blue Spaces—the first chamber piece ever written for Irish bouzouki. It was premiered in November 2008 with another commission, Sibling Rivalry for Irish bouzouki and electronics, by noted electro-acoustic composer Paul Rudy, with New Ear Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Later that month Roger performed In Blue Spaces in its New Mexico premier with the Taos Chamber Music Group.
In July 2012 he was a guest performer with the celebrated Irish traditional group Frankie Gavin & De Dannan at the Colorado Irish Festival, and in September he had the honor of performing with accordion master Paddy O’Brien at the Spanish Peaks International Celtic Music Festival in La Veta, Colorado.
Prof. Landes is conducting research into the revival of English bagpipes, as well as the interrelated revivals of bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies associated with the European dance music revival.
He is the author of the Hal Leonard Irish Bouzouki Method (2014).
Since coming to TTU as a grad student in 2009 Landes has been teaching the large enrollment History of Rock and Roll class, which is a perennial favorite with students campus wide.
Prof. Landes’s research interests include American and European traditional music, American popular music, and folk music revival.
Before deciding to devote his energies to teaching full time he had a 30+ year career as a touring performer, recording artist, bandleader, and producer in the field of Irish traditional music, co-founding the critically-acclaimed American Celtic band Scartaglen in 1982. He appeared on the group’s three recordings: Scartaglen (1984), The Middle Path (1987), and Last Night’s Fun (1992).
Scartaglen contributed a track to the best-selling 1993 Narada Records collection Celtic Odyssey, which was on the Billboard charts for almost two years. After Scartaglen disbanded in 1994 he performed in the short-lived quintet Glenfire (1994-1995), which explored the common ground between Irish and Cape Breton traditional musics. From 1995 to 2003 he performed in a duo with singer Connie Dover.
During his years with Scartaglen, Roger established himself as a first-rate accompanist and arranger, and since then has emerged as a master soloist, performing Irish tunes on the bouzouki, mandolin, tenor banjo and guitar with dazzling technical skill and creativity. He is known for his uncanny ability to translate music from the fiddle and the uilleann pipes to fretted string instruments, while retaining the essence of those more traditional instruments.
Roger’s solo CD, Dragon Reels, was recorded in Nashville with Grammy Award-winning engineer and producer Bil VornDick. Released in 1997, it garnered unanimous critical praise.
Roger has produced recordings for Michael Dugger (At Early Dawn), Chris Grotewohl (Under the Influence), Dan Grotewohl (Bear in the Greengrass), Gabriel’s Gate (Departures), and Chris Smith (Coyote Banjo).
The Janissary Stomp, a ground-breaking collection of original bouzouki duets with New Mexico roots musician Chipper Thompson, was released in 2001.
In great demand as a teacher, Roger has been on the staff at the St. Louis Tionól; Catskills Irish Arts Week; Friday Harbor Irish Music Camp; Swannanoa Gathering Celtic Week; Milwaukee Irish Festival Summer School; Seattle Cittern Symposium; Alasdair Fraser’s Valley of the Moon Scottish Fiddle Camp; Music, Arts, and Technology Camp; and the O’Flaherty Irish Music Retreat.
He is the founder and artistic director of ZoukFest, the first international gathering devoted to the Irish bouzouki, which he started in 1998. ZoukFest moved with Roger to Taos, New Mexico in 2001, and since then has grown into a full-fledged world music camp, with the addition of classes for other instruments and vocals, in a range of musical styles. ZoukFest was held at the College of Santa Fe in 2007-8; in 2009-11 it moved to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque; as of 2012 it takes place at the Santa Fe University of Art & Design in Santa Fe.
Roger appeared in and contributed to the soundtrack of the 1999 film Ride with the Devil, directed by Ang Lee (Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon, Life of Pi). He has appeared on the National Public Radio shows Mountain Stage and A Prairie Home Companion. In April 2001, his music was featured in a PBS documentary, Last Stand of the Tallgrass Prairie.
In 2002, Roger joined Spanish Galician master musician and Chieftains alumnus Carlos Nuñez on his first US tour. Later that year he toured in a trio with Irish fiddle phenom Frankie Gavin (De Dannan) and harmonica virtuoso Rick Epping (Pumpkinhead, Arcady).
In 2004 he had the pleasure of accompanying legendary Irish fiddler Tommy Peoples (The Bothy Band) for a week of concerts in New Mexico.
In 2007 he completed a short tour with acclaimed Irish fiddler/tenor banjoist John Carty.
Roger performed for several years in a duo with fiddler and guitarist Randal Bays. Their live house concert CD House to House was named one of the Top Five Picks of 2005 by the Irish Times (Dublin).
In 2006 composer Paul Elwood completed a chamber piece for Roger-- In Blue Spaces—the first chamber piece ever written for Irish bouzouki. It was premiered in November 2008 with another commission, Sibling Rivalry for Irish bouzouki and electronics, by noted electro-acoustic composer Paul Rudy, with New Ear Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Later that month Roger performed In Blue Spaces in its New Mexico premier with the Taos Chamber Music Group.
In July 2012 he was a guest performer with the celebrated Irish traditional group Frankie Gavin & De Dannan at the Colorado Irish Festival, and in September he had the honor of performing with accordion master Paddy O’Brien at the Spanish Peaks International Celtic Music Festival in La Veta, Colorado.
Prof. Landes is conducting research into the revival of English bagpipes, as well as the interrelated revivals of bagpipes and hurdy-gurdies associated with the European dance music revival.
He is the author of the Hal Leonard Irish Bouzouki Method (2014).
Alumni staff
Heather Beltz
Heather Beltz ([email protected]) is currently completing her PhD in Fine Arts with a concentration in music/musicology and served as the Administrative Coordinator for the Vernacular Music Center, handling all digital media. She received her Bachelor of Arts in Music at Texas A&M University - Corpus Christi and her Master's in Musicology at Texas Tech University. Her interests include Irish music & culture, African diaspora, musics developed in the USA, dance music, cultural exchange, authenticity, and performance practice. While attending Texas Tech, she traveled to Ireland, with Dr. Christopher Smith, which led to her thesis, titled "The Power of Sound: Music and Magic in Pre-Christian Irish Folklore." Outside of Texas Tech, Heather leads an Irish group, the Yellow Rose Ceili, is a musician in Old News Banjos, and is a Board Member and head of the PR Committee of the non-profit organization, Hub City Contra.
Anne Wharton
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Currently pursuing her PhD in Fine Arts at Texas Tech University, Anne Wharton ([email protected]) served as the Movement Director for the Vernacular Music Center as well as the TA in Vernacular Dance for the TTU School of Music. Wharton created and teaches Dance Practices for Musicians , which focuses on somatic awareness, wellbeing and improvisational tools. Her research interests include the Bal Folk revival of traditional music and dancing in France, Irish traditional music and dance, and the physical and emotional benefits to communities participating in vernacular music and dance. Wharton holds an Associates of Arts in Dance from Austin Community College, a BFA in Dance and a BS in Mass Communication and Public Relations from Texas State University, and a MM in Musicology from Texas Tech University.
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Abi Rhoades
Abi Rhoades ([email protected]) is currently completing a PhD in Arts Administration; she served as the founding administrative coordinator for the TTU Vernacular Music Center (VMC); her dissertation research focuses on enhancing and strategizing the mechanisms that facilitate international Fine Arts student exchange. She also serves as President of the Tech Set Dancers and the Lubbock chapter of Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann. A Lubbock native, Abi has experience ranging from more traditional ballet and modern dance to salsa, Irish sets, and English country dance. An alumna of Dr. Christopher Smith’s “Irish Music & Folklore” class and field trip, she attended the Fleadh Nua in Ennis, County Clare; in addition, she has extensive experience at Study Abroad, which also forms the topic of her dissertation. Abi was the creator of the first VMC dance-oriented event, spearheading the “Dancing with Mr. Darcy” fundraiser to provide support for the annual VMC concert series. A fervent advocate of community participation, she offers adult instruction in English country dance and in Spring 2011 added children’s dance classes at the Maxey Community Center.
Candice Holley
Candice Holley ([email protected]) completed a PhD in Fine Arts with a concentration in Musicology at Texas Tech University. Her research interests include the influence of nationalistic traits in the piano music of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and a dissertation topic on sacred music in Italy. Holley received her Bachelor of Arts in Music Studies and Master of Music in Piano Performance from the University of New Orleans, where she graduated magna cum laude and summa cum laude, respectively. In addition to her academic pursuits, she has also been a soloist of the Delta Festival Ballet in New Orleans since 2004, dancing lead roles in The Nutcracker, Coppelia, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Aladdin and many others. Her training has afforded her the opportunity to study at various intensive ballet workshops at Austin Ballet, Boston Ballet, the Kirov in Washington D.C., Burklyn Ballet in Vermont and L’Ecole de Danse Classique du Princess Grace in Monte Carlo.
Marusia Pola Mayorga
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Marusia Pola ([email protected]) is a Mexican cellist and completed her Master's in Musicology at Texas Tech. She received her bachelor's degree in Music performance from the Universidad de las Americas in Puebla, Mexico in 2008 and her Master of Music in Cello Performance from the Middle Tennessee State University in 2013. As a performer, she has worked with several professional symphonic orchestras in Puebla and Chiapas Mexico. Her research interest focuses on popular music and gender studies.
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Kathryn Mann
Kathryn Mann ([email protected]) served as the coordinating editor for the Journal of the Vernacular Music Center while completing her PhD in Fine Arts with a concentration in Musicology. She received a Bachelor of Arts in Music and a minor in International Studies from Georgia College and State University while amassing odd jobs in fields ranging from foreign language tutoring to lifeguarding. While studying at GCSU, she was given the opportunity to study Italian Language in Italy, sparking a passion for learning new languages. She continued her education at Texas Tech University where she received her Master of Music in Musicology. While working towards completing her Master’s degree, she traveled to Ireland with Dr. Christopher Smith, where she was able to take language lessons in Irish. It was this experience that solidified a passion for Irish song and the complex language used to sing it. Her research interests include popular music, ballads and Irish song.
Amy McDevitt
Amy McDevitt completed a M.M. in Musicology from Texas Tech University. As a musicologist, her areas of research include: baroque opera and its stage performance practice, twentieth century opera and politics, art song, the works of Monteverdi and Mozart, propaganda and how it engages with the arts, and the interaction between classic literature and music. Her master's thesis will focus on the twenty-first century North American song cycle. In addition to her academic studies, Amy assists in teaching the course "Critical Issues in Art and Culture" at TTU. She received a B.S. in Music with a minor in English and a Vocal Performance Certificate from Southwest Baptist University in 2013.
Adolfo Estrada
Adolfo Estrada ([email protected]) is completing a PhD in Fine Arts with a concentration in Ethnomusicology at Texas Tech University. Focused on musics of Greater Mexico, his research interests converge on the implications of regional son practices within a transnational context. Adolfo holds a BA in Mexican American Studies with a minor in music from the University of Texas-Pan American and a MM in ethnomusicology from the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Specializing in mariachi guitar performance practice, he has taught at multiple mariachi conference workshops from 2002 to the present and is frequently invited to give guitar clinics throughout the southwestern United States. Owing to his vast experience, he has had the honor of performing with Mariachi Vargas de Tecalitlán, Mexico’s premier mariachi ensemble, in addition to professional recording experience with Mariachi Internacional Guadalajara “20 Aniversario”, Mariachi Rock-O “Sonidos de Jalisco Vol.01”. He also has significant accompaniment experience with such artists that include Plácido Domingo, Flor Silvestre, Vikki Carr, Leo Dan, Azucena, and others.
