Revolutionary Lives: Colonial Conviviality with Bells & Motley Olden Music (Sondra & John Bromka)

Lively dance tunes, popular songs, meeting-house anthems, and harvest ballads and choruses meet together here in a program that combines musical heritage and history. The authentic historical instrumentation is exciting and diverse, including harp, hurdygurdy, hammer dulcimer, French & English bagpipes, recorders, Baroque oboe, African banjo, Spanish guitar, and wire-strung cittern.
Bells & Motley Olden Music are the husband wife team who perform on a wide range of period instruments (many researched and and reconstructed by the artists themselves), presenting authentic music from various cultures and time periods in their concerts, theatre works, folk operas, music and dance workshops, and curriculum-based residencies.
Revolutionary Lives is produced by the Folklife Center at Crandall Public Library to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Battles of Saratoga with a yearlong Folklife Gallery exhibition, public-access online StoryMap, and these events, made possible by generous grant funding from the Champlain Valley National Heritage Partnership, with additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts supported by the Governor's Office and the New York State Legislature.