The Lake Vermilion Cultural Center will be hosting two exciting events next week. First, on Tuesday, July 15 at 7:00 PM Award winning author of Tree Spirited Woman, Colleen Baldrica, will share her inspirational story and discusses the writing process followed by a Q & A session. A free-will donation will be accepted at the door for her talk.

Colleen Moran Baldrica is an official Chippewa (Ojibwe) Tribe member of the Pembina Band, from the White Earth Reservation in Northern Minnesota. She has worked for more than 28 years in public education, and holds advanced degrees with an emphasis in School Counseling. She has lived her entire life in the St. Croix River Valley, and currently resides in Stillwater, Minnesota, with her husband. Presently, she is a mentor to new authors, leads drumming circles, does presentations, and is always available for questions.

Second, Four Fipple-Flute Friends (FF-FF) will perform a concert on Thursday, July 17 also in St. Mary’s Hall at the LVCC. Every Friday afternoon in Duluth, Bill Bastian, Shelley Gruskin, Karen Keenan, and Penny Schwarze meet to play fipple flutes, aka recorders. (“Fipple” refers to a construction feature of end-blown flutes such as recorders.) Together, these four friends and retired music instructors from St. Scholastica explore music from the 13th through 21st centuries, representing the wide span of time in which the recorder has been in use.

The widespread use of the recorder in elementary-school music instruction, contributes to the idea that makes one think of it as a children’s instrument. But throughout its history, the recorder has been played by professional musicians at the highest levels of skill. Between the extremes of school-age beginner and virtuosic professional lies a range of opportunities for the adult amateur to take up recorder as a tool for discovering musical repertoire. 

Shelley Gruskin, an internationally-recognized professional recorder player, leads the group. The other three players, though accomplished musicians in other areas, took up the recorder only recently. They discovered in their retirement years that learning new instruments is not only possible, it’s stimulating and fun!

The concert will offer a sample of music arranged for a quartet of recorders of various sizes, including music from different historical eras, folk music from around the world, Yiddish klezmer songs, and musical representations of birds. A suggested admission fee of $10 or “pay what you can” will be accepted at the door.

The summer programming for the LVCC is made possible by a grant from the Arrowhead Regional Arts Council. The LVCC is located at 705 Main Street in Tower.