Your monthly news from the New Hampshire Scottish Music Club

Volume 36, No. 10, June 2025

“Having fun with Scottish Music”

Our June 8th Gathering

This month, at our last gathering before the summer break, we will play through the tunes that Alan Wilson, our Tune Master, explored in his Tune Tales blog throughout the year. For links to all of the music, visit this page.

We will also have a short annual meeting before we dive into the tunes. We will talk about our financial status, grants both received and pending, and our plans for next year.

Reminder: The gatherings and Granite Skyes take a break in July and August. Have a wonderful summer, and see you all at the picnic in August!

Annual Picnic

The annual picnic will be held at Anne’s house on Sunday, August 24, from 1pm to 5pm. It’s a potluck, so bring your favorite dish to share, as well as anything you’d like to drink. After we eat, drink and socialize, we’ll jam in the great room, outside or in the barn. Bring your instrument, music, and a music stand. We should have enough folding chairs.

Time to Vote!

The ballot to vote for board members and to approve some amendments to the club’s by-laws has been emailed to SMC members. We have volunteers who have stepped up to run for the board, and as a nonprofit we have to make it official with a vote. Thank you for taking a moment to help the club with this important task.

Tune Tales

Each month our Tune Master, Alan Wilson, selects a few new tunes to add to our repertoire and writes a blog post sharing their history and fun facts about them. Click here for the latest edition and here for the music.

May Workshop Summary

Sally and Paul Wells guided us through the history of two well-known tunes, “Off to California” and “The Campbells are Coming.” We played through a few variations of each one and saw how they changed when the tune was passed from musician to musician.

A Great Concert Season

This year’s concert season was fun and we had very enthusiastic audiences at both Peterborough and Portsmouth. With Annelise conducting and Gordon on the piano, we gave rousing performances.

The Portsmouth venue had a large audience of perhaps 70 people who clapped with the music at several times. Our MC, Kip, kept things going.

A big thank you to the music committee for choosing such great tunes and to all the musicians who committed to the rehearsals and played beautifully. We all had a great time!

In Memory of Elly Abelson

A tribute to Elly, a longtime member of the NHSMC, who passed away in March:

Elly was an active member of the NH Scottish Music Club. When his hands were too stiff to play, he continued to attend our concerts and commented on our playing.  He especially was fond of tunes written by Shetland fiddler Tom Anderson and studied with Tom at various  workshops.  He loved jokes and was an active Democrat.

- Sylvia Miskoe

To learn more about Elly, see his obituary here.

Join Us for Board Meetings

Ever wonder what your Board does? Join us for Board Meetings! All meetings are open to our members. We meet (usually) the first Wednesday of the month at 7 PM on Zoom. Meetings are an hour or less and we would welcome anyone who is interested to see how we run the organization. Send an email to nhscottishmusic@gmail.com and we’ll send you the Zoom link.

Back Issues of Granite Skyes

If you are new to our organization and would like to learn more about us, or you have been with us for many years and are waxing nostalgic, you can read many years worth of our monthly newsletter, Granite Skyes, here.