Hello – I’m a solo traditional fiddler, specializing in weaving lush sonic backgrounds to create a beautiful container for big life moments.
Solo fiddle players have been creating ambience and joy for weddings and other community ceremonies for centuries. It’s a focused, rich, down-to-earth choice for prelude music and cocktail hours, and can be woven into your ceremony with processionals, wedding marches, or recessionals.
From smooth, droning listening tunes, to up-tempo, energetic celebratory melodies, I play fiddle music that reflects my lived experience in folk culture as an Upper Midwesterner. The sound resonates with all ages. There is a sleek elegance in this heritage – one musician with one instrument, acoustically pouring out the tones and rhythms that help folks emotionally open for ceremony and bind memories together.
A sample of sounds from my repertoire, rooted in my study of Southeastern and Midwestern fiddle music as well as fiddle and dance traditions from Finland, Sweden & Norway.
In addition to nuptials, I’ve helped create a container for a great diversity of rites of passage. Celebrations of life, community holding through grief, personal change – all of these transitions can be supported through the medicine of music.
About the musician:
Laurel Premo is known for her rhythmically deep and rapt delivery of roots music, spanning the crossover of old-time and bluesy American traditions to darker Scandinavian sounds. Her solo performances dive deep into traditional and new fiddle music, revealing a bloom of underlying harmonic drones, minimalist repetition, and rich polyrhythms. She is a Michigan-based artist first introduced to folk music and traditional dance by her parents and later mentored by Joel Mabus (clawhammer banjo, Michigan), Arto Järvelä (fiddle, Finland), and Ånon Egeland (fiddle, Norway). Working with these Nordic master musicians as an adult both anchored and honed artistic expression that was cultivated as she was raised in the folk culture of the Upper Midwest.
I’m a collaboratively minded artist, honored to hold the role of accompanying important rituals with music.
Please write me at booking@laurelpremo.com to talk about your event.