Making it fun: Stillwater Fiddle Camp attracts young and old. See them in concert.

Mary Divine, Pioneer Press
·7 min read

Within hours of arriving at Fiddle Camp in Stillwater this week, students were learning the art of improvising from two masters.

Bluegrass, explained Brian Wicklund and Joe Walsh, is all about improvisation. Wicklund, the camp’s director, and Walsh, the camp’s resident mandolin teacher, teamed up for a duet of the bluegrass classic “Take This Hammer,” and then invited their students to join in.

“There’s a danger to playing bluegrass,” Wicklund told the 15 campers gathered for one of the afternoon classes at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Stillwater. “There’s sort of a gunslinger aspect to it: ‘Hey, check out what I can do.’ But I was also really listening carefully to (Walsh), and he was playing some really cool synchronizations that took me in a different direction, too, and he was listening to me and playing off my rhythm. There’s this open dangerous communication that is happening that is fun. It’s really a blast.”

Wicklund started offering Fiddle Camp – a four-day program that culminates in a concert on Friday afternoon – in 2009.

“I was going off to do all different kinds of workshops around the country and some in Sweden and Canada, and the mother of a few kids I was teaching started asking about opportunities for her own kids locally,” said Wicklund, who lives in Marine on St. Croix.

Wicklund said he couldn’t handle the logistics of starting his own camp; the mother, Marty Button, offered to help, he said.

Because of COVID, the camp went online in 2020 and wasn’t held in 2021. About 30 children and adults – ranging in age from 9 to 70 – are participating in this year’s camp. Wicklund has always made the camps intergenerational.

“There have always been some intrepid adults who have joined camp,” he said. “It’s one of those rare opportunities for intergenerational learning. It’s great for everybody. It really builds a nice community.”

FROM CLASSICAL TO BLUEGRASS

Wicklund, who grew up in St. Peter, Minn., started playing the violin at 7 years old, when his parents enrolled him in classical Suzuki violin lessons. Two years later, he found his life’s passion – bluegrass music – when his mother, Faith, brought home a couple of Flatt and Scruggs records as research for an anthropology paper on country music.

“I put those on the record player for the first time, and I flipped out,” he said. “I just loved the energy and the speed of how fast they were playing the tunes … and the overall sound. It’s always a hard thing to explain why music really hits somebody, but it totally hit me.”

Wicklund, 57, started playing bluegrass with his father, David, who had taught himself how to play the banjo.

“We started going to some bluegrass events in the Twin Cities, and I connected with some other fiddle players,” Brian Wicklund said. “I didn’t have a teacher, but I had a little portable cassette tape player that I brought with me everywhere I went, and I would always corner someone who was better than me and wouldn’t let them go until they taught me something new.”

After graduating from Gustavus Adolphus College, Wicklund started playing the fiddle professionally with Minnesota-based bluegrass band Stoney Lonesome, which regularly appeared on “A Prairie Home Companion.”

Wicklund now plays with the Barley Jacks and teaches private lessons and at workshops around the world. He is the creator of “The American Fiddle Method,” a best-selling online curriculum that is billed as providing “the beginner with the elements needed to become a proficient fiddler.”

Wicklund began teaching online lessons prior to the pandemic via Zoom. “I was doing Zoom before it was cool,” he said.

The switch to online teaching seemed like a natural progression after years of teaching private lessons. People who sign up for “The American Fiddle Method” get access to Wicklund’s entire curriculum and can sign up for office hours with Wicklund for personal tutoring, he said. He also will be teaching group lessons over Zoom this fall, he said.

MAKING IT FUN

Wicklund excels at teaching because he’s a “a great musician first of all, and he’s really fun,” said Walsh, a professional musician and teacher who lives in Portland, Maine. “It’s a good combination of an extremely dedicated student of the music and making it accessible, which isn’t always a given, and making it fun.”

Zoe Wagner, 13, of Minneapolis, has attended five of Wicklund’s Fiddle Camps. She started playing violin when she was 5 years old and enrolled in camp at the suggestion of her violin teacher when she was in second grade, she said.

“He’s really funny, so it’s really fun to be in a class with him because he’s always making jokes and stuff like that,” she said. “He’s just really smart, and he knows what he’s talking about. It’s amazing how much we learn after just four days.”

The camp is for musicians who play fiddle, cello, viola, mandolin, guitar and bass; campers range from beginners who have played for only a year to seasoned professionals “who want to step up their game,” Wicklund said.

“I like how he teaches,” said Emmett Cooper, 15, of Minneapolis, who plays the cello. “He’s not, like, too slow, but he’s able to help everyone learn their part without slowing everyone down when one person is slower.”

David Vincent, 70, of Red Wing, who taught guitar and guitar repair at Minnesota State College Southeast in Red Wing, is attending his “sixth or seventh” Fiddle Camp this summer. Vincent, who also plays the mandolin, learned about the camp at a bluegrass festival in Minneapolis, he said.

Wicklund “is a great teacher, and he brings in great teachers,” Vincent said. “In this kind of music, ‘famous’ is kind of a relative term, but for people who are really into this kind of music, Brian is really well-known.”

Attending camp means Vincent has a whole week to focus on the mandolin, he said. “At home, I may practice for a half hour or an hour a day,” he said. “I’m not going to put in four or five hours in a day like I will when I’m at a camp.”

Vincent and the other campers will have learned 12 new tunes by the time they perform their recital concert on Friday afternoon, Wicklund said.

“There is something about a camp situation where people just learn so much faster,” he said. “We have three fiddle teachers this year — all of whom are teaching their classes, like, six to eight new tunes. They also learn how to play together — not only do they learn melodies, but they also learn how to play chords and accompany other musicians. One aspect of this camp is teaching how to play in a bluegrass context in which students learn not just the melodies, but the chords. They also learn how to sing the tunes and also how to sing in harmony. It’s just an amazing amount of music and skills that people learn in a really short amount of time.”

But, just like any summer camp, the best part of attending is creating community and making lifelong friends, Wicklund said.

“There are so many kids and adults who have met and become friends, and a lot of those friendships started 10 years ago and are still going strong.”

FIDDLE CAMP CONCERTS

The Fiddle Camp staff concert will be 7 p.m. Thursday at St. Paul Lutheran Church in Stillwater. The concert will feature Brian Wicklund, Danielle Enblom, A.J. Srubas, Joe Walsh and Mike Cramer. Tickets are $20 in advance; $25 at the door. To purchase tickets, go to https://www.eventbrite.com/e/fiddle-masters-concert-tickets-321415060097

The Fiddle Camp student recital will be 2:30 p.m. Friday at the church. It is free and open to the public.

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