styled hammer dulcimer these were
invented in Persia spread throughout
Europe by gypsies and Crusaders who
carried them on their backs and as they
went along to the different cultures
some people in those cultures looked at
that and said mmm I like that I’m gonna
turn that into my own this one ended up
being the Ukrainian style of it it’s
called a timbale in ukrainian and it was
built by my grandfather based on one
that he got when he was young so now
I’ve literally have it fall in my lap
and I’ve sort of improvised and made
little songs with it that I share with
other people when I was first invited to
be here
I heard signal versus noise and I
thought oh my goodness what does that
mean to me and I thought about it and
thought about it and then I came to the
conclusion that it’s all noise it’s all
noise until our brains can figure out
the pattern in it to recognize a signal
that’s underneath or find some signal in
it that makes sense to us and then I
realized that that doesn’t fill eight
minutes so so I’m gonna play another
one thing that comes up is how do you
name a song that’s instrumental that has
no lyrics to it you see if I gave this a
name then it kind of robs you of you
interpreting it and making your own
signal out of it okay so I kind of
hesitate and I make really vague names
two songs but this one’s called um this
one’s called meadow because my daughter
Egan sort of said oh it’s a meadow and
now I associate that was out and now she
robbed me of my own making my own you
can this is meadow
[Music] [Applause]