This beautiful Irish landscape was created by my father-in-law Jon Dutcher as a gift for my parents. Regardless of how you feel about green beer or the question of the snake metaphor, today is a day to celebrate the depth of beauty and humanity in Irish culture now and for centuries past. If you’re looking for a… Read More A day to celebrate!
My cousin Linda posted this article on Facebook this week and I can’t get it out of my mind. It was published sometime in 1983. This is a profile of my paternal great-grandfather, Homer Rayburn. He grew up in Tennessee and raised his family in Niles, Michigan. I didn’t know him well because he died… Read More Lineage
I have often alluded to the fact that I arrived here in the Portlandia of the Midwest quite by accident more than half my life ago and have stayed largely because I’m too complacent to make any efforts toward settling elsewhere. Come now, that’s not the whole story. Yes, Iowa City is a place where… Read More Just Living
We had a wonderful audience last night at Theatre Cedar Rapids for our benefit concert for “Just Right for Me!”, TCR’s theatre arts class designed for autistic children. If you weren’t able to attend but you’d like to make a donation to the cause, visit the TCR donation page and indicate in the “Notes” text box… Read More Thank you, TCR!
I am delighted to invite you to experience our traditional Irish band The Beggarmen in a concert that will be taking place on the set of Irish playwright Conor McPherson‘s “The Weir” at Theatre Cedar Rapids. The last time I performed on TCR‘s Grandon Stage this past summer, I was a barefoot and pigtailed fiddler playing… Read More The Beggarmen in Concert at Theatre Cedar Rapids
I’m not a medical professional. Once upon a time, I was a board-certified music therapist but I let my board certification lapse when I had two babies in two years. Daycare wasn’t remotely affordable for one baby, let alone two. When I was doing my music therapy internship, I did work briefly with some autistic… Read More Into the Woods
If you click on the image, it will open to a larger size but here’s all the information that you need cut and pasted below: Bua Traditional Irish music: vocals, dance, fiddle, flute, guitar, bouzouki, pipes, whistle, concertina House Concert Saturday, October 25 at 7 pm 829 Kirkwood Avenue in Iowa City Sponsored by Iowa… Read More Bua is coming to town!
I’m very proud to present our 8 year old son Atticus performing his original song “Flying Notes”: The lyrics are: “Notes fly, notes fly, notes fly, notes fly; flying notes, flying notes; sink down low, sink down low; back again, back again; here’s the ending of the song!” Beautiful and factual! You can see the… Read More Notes Fly
With the help of a grant from the Community Foundation of Johnson County (Iowa), the Iowa City Senior Center and its intergenerational folk choir, the Family Folk Machine, produced a music video for the song “Brown Gold,” which celebrates the wonders of composting. Our family is so delighted to be a part of this!
My students, both the ones I gave birth to and the ones who come to me for a musical education, are used to me using sports analogies to illustrate ideas about technique and practice. We all have a good laugh about this instructional tendency of mine because I am the last person you would find doing… Read More Wheelhouse, Population 1
Tara McGovern 