Cleek Schrey premieres a new fiddle work on his hardanger d’amore, performed in the Lampo office. The ten-string instrument has five bowed strings over five sympathetic ones—which aren’t played, but vibrate in response—filling our small room with rich overtones.

Strange Creek Music takes its name from fiddler John Johnson of Strange Creek, West Virginia. Schrey reimagines Johnson’s repertoire of Appalachian fiddle tunes, presented first in their traditional form and then stretched into free improvisations. The melodies are rooted in dance, but Schrey turns them inward, into something solitary, marked by his own history.

“Instead of attempting an expansion of tradition via experimentalism, I’m interested in the opposite,” Schrey writes. “Drawing on traditional fiddling techniques and my solo practice of improvisation, I want to convey the ethos of interiority, lonesomeness, and mystery that inhabits this music.”

Tonight Schrey presents eight 20-minute performances, each limited to four people, from 5:30 to 9:30 p.m. Each performance is devoted to a different old-time tune:

Hell Among the Yearlings
Forked Deer
Camp Chase
Irish Girl
Grey Eagle
Shelvin’ Rock
Three Forks of Reedy
Piney Mountain

He explains:

“John Johnson (1916-1996) was a traditional fiddler from Strange Creek in Braxton County, West Virginia. His father, recognizing the boy’s talent at age five, invited fiddlers to come stay for days, even weeks, at a time to share their old tunes with such a willing young student. School was a rowboat’s pull across the Elk River and a mile’s walk along the railroad tracks, which meant he went only occasionally. As a young man, he joined the army and traveled the breadth of the U.S., working as an itinerant laborer. He learned his music directly from local fiddlers like Edden Hammons, born in 1875, and incorporated what he heard on the radio.

“The old fiddle music of West Virginia is known for its eccentric and unpredictable phrasing. The melodies are dance forms: reels, breakdowns, rags, waltzes. To the usual 8- and 16-bar phrases, extra beats may be added. When this occurs the tune is called “crooked.” To further confuse matters, there are sometimes “floating” parts that may be played or left out at the player’s discretion. A dancer, most likely a lone flat-footer, might attempt to dance to this music, but could easily trip. They would have to listen closely.

“The only publicly available recordings of John Johnson were made by Professor Louis Chappell of West Virginia University over a concentrated two-day session in August 1947, using a homemade aluminum-disc recording machine. At the time, Johnson was 31 and didn’t own a fiddle.

“I never met Johnson, but I know several musicians who spent time with him. They paint a picture of a man who was intriguing and mysterious. The banjo player John Herrmann told me about his time as Johnson’s wrangler at a festival in the 1980s. Each evening as events came to a close he would disappear into the woods, claiming he never slept indoors. ‘Sometimes I live in the woods for months, living off the honeydew dripping from the leaves,’ he said. Gerry Milnes, of Elkins, W.Va., took Johnson in as a boarder for a time. After returning from a short trip, Gerry discovered his house in shambles, with tables and dressers overturned. Johnson claimed there had been an earthquake. (He was immediately kicked out.) The fiddler John Morris of Ivydale, W.Va., told me an odd tale about Johnson floating for several miles down a frozen river—under the ice. He would occasionally lift his head up in air pockets to breathe. There are more strange stories.

“Strange Creek Music is an opportunity for me to spend some intense time with Johnson’s music: eight of his tunes played over a period of four hours for audiences of four. These transformations are an excavation of my own psychological processes and associations: of Johnson and his sound, growing up near the West Virginia border, my embodied memories of fiddling, and the light and air in mountain forests. I won’t attempt to imitate Johnson’s style, but take his repertoire as a way into my own music, reaching beyond melody into place, atmosphere, and noise.”

Cleek Schrey (b.1984, Bath Co., Va.) is a fiddler, composer, and improviser. He plays traditional music from Appalachia and Ireland as well as experimental music with a wide range of musicians. Schrey performs on the fiddle, the hardanger d’amore, a violin with sympathetic strings, and the daxophone, a wooden idiophone designed by Hans Reichel. His practice is preoccupied with the physical phenomena of vibrating strings and the histories and aesthetics of recording technologies.

Collaborators include electronic music pioneer David Behrman, the viol da gamba player Liam Byrne, traditional fiddle icon Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh, and the late Fluxus artist Yasunao Tone. He has performed at the Big Ears Festival, Knoxville, Tenn.; Kilkenny Arts Festival, Kilkenny; SuperSense Festival of the Ecstatic, Melbourne; Issue Project Room, New York, N.Y.; Roulette, New York, N.Y. (in a program curated by Meredith Monk); and the Beckett in London Festival with Gare St. Lazare, London, among others.

Recent releases include The Southern Harmony and Musical Companion (Pagans, 2024), a recording of shape-note melodies transcribed for organs with Weston Olencki, and Beehive Cathedral (Dear Life Records, 2024), an album of traditional southern music with Joseph Decosimo and Luke Richardson.

Past residencies include Pioneer Works, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Roulette Intermedium, Brooklyn, N.Y.; Harvestworks, New York, N.Y.; and the Watermill Center, Water Mill, N.Y. Schrey holds an MFA in Music Composition from Princeton University and has lectured at the University of Pennsylvania and the Cooper Union. He lives in Brooklyn.

Cleek Schrey’s Strange Creek Music is part of an occasional series of commissioned works designed for small audiences in the Lampo office.