IT is obvious that the musical buzz that animated fiddler Liz Doherty growing up in Buncrana in the 1970s and 80s is very much alive and kicking today in one of traditional music's best known, highly-admired and universally-liked musicians, teachers, administrators, producers... the list could go on, but I'll stop there...
"The two fleadhs we had in Buncrana in the 70s were our summer," she recalls.
"There was this magic in the air with this wonderful music floating about everywhere, people landing from everywhere with, to our young ears, exotic foreign English accents and people staying in tents, that buzz and that energy and that excitement and the possibilities they created, we absorbed all that, even at that age young age and some of us sought to recreate it ever since."
And Liz had done that in spades, playing in bands such as Nomos, the 16-piece Fiddlesticks, the Bumblebees and most lately with a coterie of female Donegal fiddlers called Sí Fiddlers.
Growing up, Liz was given her first fiddle by her grand-uncle Joe Grant – who sadly passed away last week – and she was later taught by the legendary fiddler Dinny McLaughlin (about whom she wrote a book).
Perhaps her music is so wonderful because, it is more than just playing the right notes in the right order, music for Liz is meant to reflect all the emotions we feel in our everyday lives, it can make us feel good and it can make us cry and everything in between.
And as well as the playing and composing, the teaching of Irish traditional music – aka the passing on of the tradition – has been a major part of Liz's life and many are finding out that teaching is a very viable income stream for musicians, now more than ever with the Covid pandemic still with us - but what makes a good teacher? I asked Liz this week.
"Well, being a great teacher isn't necessarily about being a brilliant musician," she explains.
"It's about being able to understand certain concepts, break them down and explain them to other people but in my view, it's not about creating clones.
"I think our job is to help people become musicians in their own right, so it's not just about showing them everything they know, it's about creating the space for these other human beings to find their own way into music."
It's that approach that won Liz the Inspirational Teacher of the Year award in 2017 as voted on by students of the Ulster University.
Now the Donegal woman has set up I Teach Trad, a website for teachers of traditional music to help them find their way in this ever-changing world.
So, say you were an uilleann piper or a flute player or a fiddler or whatever and you wanted to become a teacher or if you wanted to become a better teacher, what can I Teach Trad offer?
"Well, there are a few things that I can offer," Liz tells me.
"I have a course that is made for people who have been teaching for a while but who want to sit back and really look at what they are doing because most musicians will have fallen into teaching without really thinking about it too much.
"Or you'll be playing a gig and someone asks you to do a bit of teaching and all of a sudden you are a 'teacher', although you've never been taught to do it and you hear this little voice in the back of your head telling you that one day (shriek) someone is going to catch you out.
"The ould imposter syndrome is a nightmare however, the I Teach Trad course lets those people know that they are most definitely not on their own."
She says that, remarkably, while musicians will talk to each other about tunes and gigs and so on, they rarely talk about the nuances of teaching.
"A lot of teaching has been about 'how?' but in this course we also ask 'Why are you teaching?', 'What are you really good at?' and 'What do you really love doing?'," says Liz.
"We also give you a framework for teaching. 'Here's a map and if you think about your teaching and reorder it this way, it will make your life a hell of a lot easier so you'll go from a scenario where you are making it all up as you go along and feeling as if you are on our own and re-inventing the wheel when everyone else is in the same position as you."
Crucially though, she adds that there is space for teachers to put their own stamp on it and since I Teach Trad started in September,
The website also offers participants a "digital badge" which isn't a wee star on your homework book but a "system addressing a worldwide gap in Continuing Professional Development (CPD)".
"For the past 30 years, loads of us have been teaching traditional music and we have had no recognition whatsoever for it," she justifiably bemoans.
"The digital badge is a way of showing that you are actually serious about your teaching, that you are not just doing it to fill the time between gigs, that you have actually invested time and money and invested in yourself as a teacher, that you are upskilling and keeping up with the current trends and something very current, that you know how to teach on line. The digital badge vouches for this."
And many people, from maestro to novice, have already availed of the I Teach Trad course, either one of the short courses or a one-off workshops, or they've availed of the mentoring services.
All this has created a new online community for trad music teachers since it started up last September.
"It's been brilliant," says Liz, mentioning the hundreds of trad teachers from all over the world how have signed up.
"Some well-known musicians such as Mike McGoldrick have reached out and what is lovely is that we're reaching such a wide spectrum of people.
"I took a four-week course for Harp Ireland recently and in the workshops there were young teachers aged 16 and 17 and on the other hand you had Janet Harbison and Aibhlín McCrann and Kathleen Loughnane, all in the one room with a harp teacher in Japan and a harp teacher in the States.
"I love that those master teachers who have been doing it for years, I love that they are open to showing that they are not done learning, that they were happy to sit in the learner's seat. They wanted to learn more so that they could do better. For me that was special."
You can find out more about Liz and the courses at iteachtrad.com
