Jan DeWeese

Instructor of Mandolin and Banjo

department: Music
office: Evans Center
specialty: Mandolin
email: rid.1@comcast.net

I have been in music education for 35 years, beginning with four years of teaching the ear-training classes at Reed College (where I graduated in music theory in 1970 and am currently adjunct faculty as well). I have given private mandolin lessons here in Portland since 1973, with my method grounded in American folk styles. Early on my focus was on Baroque and ragtime but soon I was specializing in Irish music, which I have played professionally since 1980 on the mandolin’s cousin, the cittern, and the traditional wooden flute. Co-founding the Oregon Folk Arts Program (with Dr. Kim Stafford) and studying non-Western rhythm with Colin Wolcott and Obo Addy expanded my mandolin work to Brazilian choro, Cuban son, and New Orleans jazz (with the clarinet, on which I minored in college). The banjo (in finger, frailing, and tenor styles) has become a tool for exploring folk music’s African and Celtic roots.

For my classes now, I offer formal studies in Irish music (flute, whistle, bodhran, cittern, mandolin, and banjo) as well as, for the mandolin family, Baroque repertoire and choro performance practice (see www.portlandchoro.com). But the core of my method, evolved over 25 years of full-time teaching, is essentially a theory course on the grammars of American vernacular styles. Based on the traditional idioms of Monroe and Scruggs, the fathers of contemporary mandolin and banjo techniques, my pedagogy provides composition studies for crafting folk music’s harmonic and rhythmic elements into improvised melody across the great range of styles that have come to constitute American music, old and new.