Call it a very happy accident.
One day 25 years ago, Voorhees, N.J., Irish musician and teacher Kathy DeAngelo received a call from the Garden State Discovery Museum in Cherry Hill, asking if she could arrange a performance of some of her harp students “and stuff.”
“I said, yeah, what are you looking for? An hour or something?” DeAngelo recalls. “They said, ‘Yeah, sure. We just want to bill it as part of our multicultural series.’ And I said, leave it with me.”
“Leave it with me,” DeAngelo immediately realized, meant she had to recruit more than just her harp students. She had to come up with a meaningful representation of young musicians. She contacted Wyndmoor, Pa., violin teacher Chris Brennan Hagy, a longtime friend, who had been presenting a youth musical show at the Philadelphia Ceili Group Festival for a couple of years. “I said, why don’t we get a bunch of our students together and put on a show?”
Hagy was game.
“And so, we conjoined our students,” DeAngelo remembers. “We had no planned set list. We had a list of tunes that we thought everybody might have in common. I had my harp students and a few fiddle students, and Chris had her fiddle students. We got together in a back room at the Discovery Museum before the show, and we asked the kids, OK, who knows this tune? We had no idea what we were going to do. We were in a panic. Kids were unwrapping their instruments, taking off their coats. There’s pizza coming for lunch, and Dennis (Gormley, DeAngelo’s multi-instrumentalist husband) and Chris and I were going around to different students, do you know this tune? Do you know that tune?”
They didn’t know all the tunes, but there were enough tunes in common that DeAngelo’s harp students could play 30 minutes, and the other kids who up to that point had never met each other could play another half hour.
After the show, DeAngelo, Hagy and Gormley saw enormous potential. “The kids were so excited, and we said, wow, wouldn’t it be good if we had actually planned something? And so, we decided to get together.”
So began the Next Generation, a project to help teach Irish tunes—such as “Egan’s Polka,” “Off to California” (a hornpipe), “The Wind That Shakes the Barley” (a reel), and countless others—to dozens of young people over the years. Next Gen also helped integrate them into the Irish musical tradition. Measured by those goals, the project is wildly successful, with many of those now grown-up “kids” still playing and playing exceptionally well. Next Gen even helped launch the career of Haley Richardson, star fiddler for the world-renowned Riverdance show.
Haley is 20 now. When she joined Next Generation, she was so small that her feet didn’t touch the floor when she sat down to play her 1/16 size student fiddle. She gives Kathy, Dennis and Chris credit for helping to help lay the groundwork for adult success, not just for her, but for so many other now adult traditional Irish musicians.
“The upbringing that we got from Chris and Kathy and Dennis, it was nothing they had to do,” Richardson says, calling in from California in the midst of a six-month Riverdance tour. “They just did it out of love for the music and the culture and for us as well. It’s such a beautiful thing, and invaluable. I’m sure every kid who has been in Next Generation can say the same. It’s just played a massive role in me as a musician.”
Next Generation meets the second Sunday of each month at the center. Most of the time, it’s exceptionally well organized—divide the kids into groups, teach a couple of tunes, play the new tunes and previously learned tunes in a session, enjoy snacks and each other’s company—but it wasn’t always that way in the beginning.
The three teachers would plan a set list and send out email notices reminding kids and parents of the upcoming Next Gen get-together, Hagy says, but many times, it was hard to predict who would come. After 25 years, it can occasionally be difficult to predict from time to time, but mostly Next Gen kids are a loyal bunch, who are grateful not just for the time and tunes that Hagy, Dennis and Kathy share, but for giving them a say in what they learn.
Hagy adds, “The model that we do is to go around and ask each kid to start a tune. And we do that pretty consistently, which is a polite type of thing to do. We give every kid the opportunity to express themselves, to say ‘Here’s my favorite tune. I’d like to do this one.’ Then they start it, and they lead it, and maybe their parents record it. That’s the model.”
The opportunity to socialize with like-minded young musicians is not lost on the kids, either.
“I remember reading an interview with Seamus Egan (front man for the late, lamented Irish supergroup Solas) where he was bemoaning the fact that in school, he didn’t have anybody to share his music with. He was an outsider,” says Gormley. “So, I really relish and cherish the opportunity to let kids who are interested in Irish music know that, hey, maybe it’s not a part of school, but here it’s a safe place to hang out.”
Fiddler Patrick “Patch” Glennan is 23 and a first-year medical student at Rutgers Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. He still plays when his schedule permits, and he, like so many Next Gen grads, is a standout. He was introduced to Next Generation at age 7 by his father Bob, who was taking guitar lessons from Dennis. Playing Irish music with kids who were interested in the genre meant a lot to him.
“I got to meet kids my own age,” he says. “That was when I met a lot of them and made a lot of good friends there. Most of the kids at Next Generation were from the Pennsylvania side. (Glennan hails from the Jersey side of the Delaware.) We would stay at the Catskills Irish Festival together, and all book rooms at Gavin’s and be next to each other. And I got a companionship out of that with kids my own age.”
Glennan also remains close friends with his adult mentors, and he is fulsome in his admiration for the effort they have put into making Next Generation a success.
“They have a great way with kids and adults alike,” he says. “They don’t have to do it (Next Generation). They’re all teachers in their own right, and they still wanted to take time to teach us and get us together. I suppose anyone can pick up sheet music and play “Silver Spear” or something. It’s about getting together and playing and sharing. Giving up their time to teach us is incredible, and I’m very grateful for it.”
Fiddler Alex Weir, now 24 and working in the biotech and finance industry in Boston, says he, too, has much to be thankful for. He was about 7 when he joined Next Gen, having started out in classical violin. But when he was about 5 years old, he took up Irish dance, and one thing led to another.
“I saw Riverdance,” he says, “and it was the coolest thing ever. Then I realized that violin was used in Riverdance—the music I had been dancing to. I thought it would be great if I could play the fiddle, to either play for the dancers or just a new thing to do. My parents had heard about Next Gen from some connections. Since I wanted to do Irish fiddling, it made perfect sense since it’s directed at younger kids.
Weir says he learned a good deal. “I got an introduction to the Irish music community that I’m still part of to this day, and lots of people that I know and keep in touch with. Next Generation let me learns tons and tons of traditional tunes, which I still play all the time. I really gained so much from Next Gen. What Kathy and Dennis and Chris do is really, really special. They’ve had such an impact on my life.”
What’s in it all for three music teachers who accidentally formed one of the most noteworthy efforts to instill a love of Irish music and tradition in youngsters? Kathy DeAngelo sums it up.
“Kids have all kinds of goals in mind for music,” she says. “We just want to make it fun. We’re not doing tests, and we’re not doing any of that. And almost all of them are playing today. That is extremely gratifying to us.”Clearly, there’s a lot to celebrate, and Chris, Dennis and Kathy are going to do just that on Sunday, June 11, at noon, at the Commodore John Barry Arts and Cultural Center, otherwise known as the Irish Center, in Mount Airy. The three are hopeful that Next Generation alums will turn out to help celebrate. Join them for this all too special event.
