Allan Atlas (aatlas@gc.cuny.edu) is on the Musicology faculty at The Graduate Center of The City University of New York, where he is the Director of the Center for the Study of Free-Reed Instruments. He performs on the English concertina with the New York Victorian Consort.
Les Branchett (squeezy@easy.com) holds a Masters Degree in International Law, and recently retired as a lecturer with a specialization in law and social-psychology. He was introduced to the concertina when a teenager as a means of recuperation following extensive injuries sustained in a train accident. He recently wrote the tutor Conquering the English Concertina: A Comprehensive Guide to the English Concertina (Gloucester: Sherborne House Publications, 2002).
Roger Digby (rdigby@hoppits.demon.co.uk) has been playing Anglo concertina for over thirty years. Playing in a fiercely English style when performing with Flowers and Frolics, he extends the instrument’s range far beyond its assumed limitations, stretching it most fully when accompanying the wide repertoire of Bob Davenport. He has a passionate belief in the integrity of traditional music.
Jody Kruskal (jody@kruskal.net) is a multifaceted musician: composer of theater, dance, and concert works, performer for adult and family audiences, freelance educator, and inventor of musical instruments. Although he has accompanied New York-area English morris and sword dancers since 1983, he is best known for developing a distinctly American style of harmonic playing on the Anglo with the country dance bands Grand Picnic and Squeezology. His solo CD, Naked Concertina, was released in 2006 and can be heard at http://cdbaby.com/cd/jody kruskal.
Gearóid Ó hAllmhuráin (gearoid_ohallmhurain@umsl.edu) is a fourth-generation traditional musician and a native of County Clare. He is the Smurfit-Stone Professor of Irish Studies and Professor of Music at the University of Missouri-St Louis. A holder of five All-Ireland Championship music titles—as concertina player, uilleann piper, and member of the Kilfenora Céilí Band, the oldest traditional dance band in Ireland—he is the author of A Pocket History of Irish Traditional Music (Dublin: O’Brien Press, 1998), as well as numerous monographs on Irish music and folk culture, and has served as a consultant for several documentaries on Irish traditional music in Europe and North America, as well as US correspondent for Raidió na Gaeltachta, Ireland’s Irish-language radio network. During the past thirty years, he has presented more than one thousand concerts on four continents, and has worked with such luminaries as Liam Clancy, David Grisman, Martin Hayes, Sharon Shannon, and the Chieftains. His CD recordings include Traditional Music from Clare and Beyond (1996), Tracin’—Traditional Music from the West of Ireland (1999), and The Independence Suite—Traditional Music from Ireland, Scotland and Cape Breton (2004), all issued on the Celtic Crossings label.
Pat Shipman (pls10@psu.edu) is a biological anthropologist who specializes in human evolution. In 1990, she resigned her academic position—though she continues to hold an Adjunct Professorship at Penn State University—in order to take up full-time writing, which includes books about science for the general reader and biographies. She became interested in Florence and Sam Baker while conducting fieldwork in East Africa—the region that the Bakers explored—and then wrote the first biography of Florence with the kind assistance of the Baker family.
Susan Wollenberg (susan.wollenberg@music.oxford.ac.uk) is Reader in Music at the University of Oxford. She is the author of Music at Oxford in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Oxford University Press, 2001) and was co-editor, with Simon McVeigh, of Concert Life in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Ashgate, 2004). Current projects include a book, edited jointly with Therese Ellsworth, under the working title Pianos and Pianists in Nineteenth-Century Britain.
