The Bagpipe Society

Trad Akademie

Merit Zloch

Close your eyes and imagine a Brothers Grimm fairy tale castle – with a big keep in one corner, on a hilltop in the middle of forest clad slopes. And now imagine… not Sleeping Beauty, but a bunch of young people and children playing music in this setting, getting to know exotic instruments some of them have never seen before, like bagpipes, hurdy-gurdy or nyckelharpa !

This has just happened at Burg Wernfels in Frankonia (which is, roughly speaking, the North Eastern part of Bavaria). The charity,Tramudera e.V., ran, for the first time, a kids-and-teens workshop weekend for traditional music and instruments that they wouldn’t encounter at their local music school.

Believe it or not, traditional and folk music has nearly no official financial or structural support in Germany – at least outside Bavaria. There are only three or four small charities that care about traditional music but they are not into German folk music and only have very little money to fund events, festivals or workshops.

Despite these rather poor circumstances, around 2010 a group of people interested in dance music from German manuscripts, started researching and spreading the music they found. Some of them run a musicians' meeting –

KlangRauschTreffen – and in order to do this they founded a charity. And this charity runs the new kids-and-teens “Trad-Akademie” workshop weekend.

One of this year's organisers and teachers was Matthias „Mattis"

Branschke, an experienced piper, composer and instrument maker from Northern Germany. He not only taught traditional music from a piper’s perspective to three ensemble groups of 10 people, he also introduced kids, teens and grown-ups to the bagpipe and provided them with a chance to try out the instrument.

The opportunity for him to do this was generously provided by The Bagpipe Society who made a grant for his travel, accommodation and a small fee.

Matthias Branschke constantly browses manuscripts discovered in the last years, for tunes either suitable or adaptable for bagpipes. The challenge for this particular project was to find something easy enough yet still interesting, as the levels of the participants varied from advanced beginners to rather experienced musicians. A special challenge for most of the kids and teens was to learn without sheet music – and they all coped very well!

The father of one child, a girl learning the double bass, is professional musician and bagpiper, who even owns a set of Matthias Branschke pipes. The daughter had never tried out one of her father’s instruments but whilst at Burg Wernfels she tried it, liked it …. and wondered why she had not thought of it earlier!

Some workshop weekends for adults provide a kind of „babysitting" to allow people to take part without having to care for their kids. In our case, we did the opposite: we had a „musical adult-sitting" (aka an ensemble group) so that the parents who accompanied their younger children were looked after whilst their offspring played music!

All participants of all ages absolutely loved the Trad-Akademie. New friendships were made and everybody was very inspired by the workshops, sessions and dancing. We received a lot of enthusiastic emails. So, our charity has decided to start planning the 2nd edition of this workshop weekend, giving everybody a chance to meet again – and to make new music and new friends - in April 2024!