{"id":20094,"date":"2026-01-13T05:31:06","date_gmt":"2026-01-13T05:31:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/20094\/"},"modified":"2026-01-13T05:31:06","modified_gmt":"2026-01-13T05:31:06","slug":"where-we-are-eric-martin-from-mennonite-country-to-gould-farm-community","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/20094\/","title":{"rendered":"WHERE WE ARE: Eric Martin, from Mennonite country to Gould Farm community"},"content":{"rendered":"

I met local musician Eric Martin at Monterey United Church of Christ, where he often played fiddle. I was a member there from 2003 until the church closed this past November, and our small congregation felt very fortunate to have our meditations accompanied by his beautiful playing. Martin is also well known as a fiddler for local contra dancing groups<\/a>, a busy music teacher, as well as a long-time member of the maintenance team at Gould Farm, the nation\u2019s first residential therapeutic community for people with mental health challenges.<\/p>\n

We talked in the music room at the Berkshire Waldorf School, where Martin was lesson planning for the upcoming week. There is a link embedded in this interview to a performance by Alchemy, one of Martin\u2019s bands, so be sure to listen. Among other gigs, he will be playing with Boston Camerata at Tanglewood this summer.<\/p>\n

Our conversation has been edited for clarity and concision.<\/p>\n

SHEELA CLARY
Where were you born?<\/p>\n

ERIC MARTIN
I was born in Goshen, Ind., and when I was two, we moved to Lancaster County, Pa., to Ephrata.<\/p>\n

CLARY
How do you pronounce it?<\/p>\n

MARTIN
EFF-rit-ah, as opposed to a-FRA-da. And it\u2019s LANcaster, not LancASter. My father was from there. I went through high school there and then went to Ithaca College and did a double major in music education and viola performance. I was a voice major for a little while. I switched to violin, which I\u2019ve been playing all my life, then to viola as my main instrument and ended up as a violist. I did my master\u2019s in viola performance in Ireland, at the Irish World Music Center. The name has changed now, but it\u2019s part of the University of Limerick. I was in the first year of that scholarship for Ithaca grads. There were four or five of us who were the guinea pigs.<\/p>\n

Grad school was a very intense experience, lots of focus on myself and my own playing. I had a great teacher there, an Italian violist named Bruno Giuranna, who would come to Ireland once a month. I\u2019d have these intense master classes, and then he would go away and I\u2019d have all this work to do for a month. I made lots of progress, but I was tired of being in a practice room, focusing on my technique and myself.<\/p>\n

When I got back from Ireland, I was going to really go for it with music, taking lots of auditions for orchestras and things like that. But I got the sense I just didn\u2019t really want to do that. I\u2019d had a friend who was volunteering at Gould Farm around that time, and she said what a great place it was. I\u2019d applied earlier to be a volunteer, but then deferred to go to Ireland and study and went when I got back.<\/p>\n

CLARY
What was it about Gould Farm that appealed to you?<\/p>\n

MARTIN
My dad was a contractor, so I grew up working with him. All through college and grad school, I worked every summer up in the Adirondacks at a rustic resort doing all kinds of maintenance work, so I had that background and felt like I wanted to get back to working with my hands and take a little break from music and be part of a community.<\/p>\n

At the farm right now, there\u2019s a pattern of people who were there 20 years ago coming back and settling down and plugging back in and bringing with them their experiences out in the real world for those of us who never left. It just has a really nice feel right now.<\/p>\n

CLARY
It also sounds like\u2014I don\u2019t want to put words in your mouth\u2014but like back when you first came you wanted to get outside of yourself?<\/p>\n

MARTIN
Yeah. I think a lot of folks struggle with finding community, and at Gould Farm, it\u2019s all right there. It\u2019s ready-made and you just plug in. I was wanting a life that just felt connected and more meaningful than the music world. The classical music world is very competitive, and I just didn\u2019t get a great feeling from trying to make it there. So, I came to Gould Farm as a volunteer, and it became a full-time staff role. I met my wife there in 2003, and we married in 2006.<\/p>\n

I\u2019d studied some fiddle playing while I was in Ireland, but not intentionally. I thought, \u2018I\u2019m going to take this time to start playing some fiddle music.\u2019 There were a bunch of musicians at Gould Farm, and we put a band together, and pretty soon we were part of the start of the Lenox Contra Dance<\/a>. I took six years off playing serious classical music before getting back into it. Now I do both, some symphony work and a lot of random freelance gigs, but then also working as a dance musician, playing for English country dances and country dances. In 2006, when Nancy and I got married, that opened things up for me a bit musically because I no longer had to work for Gould Farm full time to live there, so I went to part time and started getting back into music, and I\u2019ve pretty much been doing that same sort of schedule since 2007.<\/p>\n

I work in the mornings for Gould Farm and then teach the afternoons and play gigs on the weekends or other evenings. I taught at Simon\u2019s Rock, and I\u2019ve been teaching [at the Berkshire Waldorf School] after school for probably 15 years. This year I stepped into doing two classes.<\/p>\n

CLARY
Tell me about the groups you play with.<\/p>\n

MARTIN
I play a lot with a group called Alchemy<\/a>, which is myself, a pianist from Battleboro, Vt., and an accordion player from Battleboro. A lot of what we do is English country dance gigs and some contra, all over the country and sometimes the world. We play locally in Sheffield and Lenox. Then there\u2019s a lot of freelance playing with different choral groups\u2014Vocalis, Cantalina Chamber Choir, Berkshire Lyric, Berkshire Bach sometimes. I\u2019m doing the Berkshire shuffle.<\/p>\n

CLARY
But on steroids! You listed off like six different names.<\/p>\n

MARTIN
Like I said, a lot of it is travel gigs. I\u2019m flying somewhere about once a month. I like going to new places. On dance weekends, people come from all over, and sometimes I\u2019ll be playing for 10 hours a day for three days. I was just down in North Carolina at the John C. Campbell Folk School, which is an amazing place. It was my first time there. They do blacksmithing, basket weaving, ceramics, three different\u2014you know, all kinds of different woodwork. People take workshops there. It\u2019s mostly adults who are trying to keep Appalachian folk traditions alive.<\/p>\n

CLARY
What was your faith background?<\/p>\n

MARTIN
I was raised Mennonite<\/a>. My grandfather was old-order Mennonite. He wore the conservative garb; my grandmother wore a bonnet. My grandfather was part of a group where when cars came around, a group of them broke off. But their rule was that the cars had to be painted flat black, including the bumper, the chrome\u2014everything. It could not be flashy. The slang term for that group is Black Bumper Mennonites.<\/p>\n

The church that I grew up in was liberal\u2014no one wore bonnets or drove buggies. A lot of people had a similar story to my father where they grew up conservative, but then one of them lived in a more liberal world. There were a lot of folks who were drawn to the Peace Church model. Our church was the Akron Mennonite Church, and Akron is Mennonite Central Committee headquarters. They do peace and missionary work and disaster relief, all kinds of great work, all over the world. Every Sunday there would be people coming to our church, visitors who were in town on their way to Zimbabwe or South Africa.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s kind of funny that was the Mennonite Church, which you think of as being\u2014<\/p>\n

CLARY
Insular\u2014<\/p>\n

MARTIN
Insular, but this brand of Mennonite was very worldly. I really valued that a lot. And there\u2019s a big tradition of four-part a capella hymn singing, so the music was pretty rich. Growing up hearing those harmonies, having that ear training every Sunday, was pretty crucial to me becoming a musician.<\/p>\n

CLARY
Your move to Gould Farm now makes more sense to me because obviously it\u2019s not a Mennonite community, but it seems like it\u2019s in the same\u2026 spirit.<\/p>\n

MARTIN
Same vein, definitely.<\/p>\n

CLARY
What\u2019s your relationship now to the Mennonite faith?<\/p>\n

MARTIN
My parents still attend the same church I grew up in, and a lot of my extended family are connected to the church there, but not all of them. Some of my dad\u2019s siblings have moved away. Some are still quite conservative. I have some aunts and uncles who wear bonnets. They all drive cars. The real conservative ones are very similar to Amish, and so no electricity. My relatives are somewhere in the middle. With the older Mennonites, they might be able to have tractors, but not rubber tires. They have steel wheels.<\/p>\n

My mom grew up in Warsaw, Ind. She was working at the Goshen Hospital as a respiratory therapist, and my father, as a Mennonite, was a conscientious objector during the Vietnam War. So when his number was called for the draft, he did alternative service and was stationed at Goshen Hospital as a janitor. That\u2019s where my folks met.<\/p>\n

CLARY
How did you come to play at the Monterey church?<\/p>\n

MARTIN
I\u2019ve known Liz [Goodman, the minister,] for a long time. My friend Danny [Garrigan-Byerly]\u2014who also played in the contra dance band that we started\u2014he had been playing. When he and his wife moved away, I think Liz just asked, \u2018Do you want to do this?\u2019<\/p>\n

I found that a lot of the dance music that I was playing, especially the English country dance music, which is a little slower, worked really well for the offertory and postlude and things like that. I could just play some of those and improvise. And it was always fun to play those hymns solo and expand on them and just see where they go.<\/p>\n

The congregation was always so warm and grateful and loving that I felt like whatever I did was going to be just fine with them. I loved those services. I felt like that was my church for the last 15 years or so.<\/p>\n

CLARY
Tell me about your family. You have three kids?<\/p>\n

MARTIN
Aiden and Nina are twins, and they go to Monument. They\u2019re sophomores. Claire is in sixth grade at DuBois Middle. They all seem pretty happy in their school experiences and are doing lots of extracurricular activities, which keeps us just super busy driving. They\u2019re doing a lot of fun stuff\u2014I\u2019m really enjoying going to all that. Aiden and Nina are both on the cross-country teams, so I\u2019ve learned how exciting cross-country can be.<\/p>\n

CLARY
For a minute.<\/p>\n

MARTIN
For a minute, and then they disappear into the woods and then you run to the next point and, oh, there they go! It\u2019s a different kind of excitement. I grew up as a soccer player, so I\u2019m used to that constant, nonstop sports excitement. This is different. I have to recalibrate a little bit.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I met local musician Eric Martin at Monterey United Church of Christ, where he often played fiddle. I…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":20095,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[60],"tags":[106],"class_list":{"0":"post-20094","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-zimbabwe","8":"tag-zimbabwe"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20094","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20094"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20094\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/20095"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20094"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20094"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/africa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20094"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}