Viveka Fox:
Fencing Fiddler!

by Cindy Ellen Hill

A half-dozen students, ten-year-olds to towering adults, gaze intently as Viveka Fox raises her high voice over the clash of weapons ringing off the gym walls at Middlebury’s Bridge School. “You learn this move by using your ears,” she shouts, connecting her foil – a thin, unsharpened competition sword with a safety ball on the tip – with her opponent’s, sliding metal on metal down the length of the blade.

One student takes advantage of the distraction to whack another boy’s leg. “He’s poking me,” comes the cry.

“It’s fencing,” Fox says, smiling warmly. “You’re supposed to poke people!” She pulls down her mask, bends her knees deeply, and raises her foil. The wire mesh obscures her hazel eyes, but it’s clear her smile has given way to intense focus. Fox, 41-year-old coach and skilled competitor of the Vermont Fencing Alliance, has entered her “fencing self.”

The personality traits of each opponent make every match different. “It’s challenging to mind and body. It’s strategic and fast-paced. Some people are aggressive, some are cagey,” she explains.

Ears like a fox are one of the keys to Fox’s fencing self: playing fiddle for the last ten years with Atlantic Crossing, a New England roots band which just released its fourth CD, Turning the Compass (see Vermont Woman, December 2006), she makes her living by ear, whether it’s judging the speed of her opponent’s sword or learning the ornamentation of a new reel.

Growing up in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Fox first heard of fencing at age 12, when she had a crush on a summer camp counselor who fenced. She decided it was “irresistibly cool.”

That same summer proved a watershed for her musical career as well. She’d been studying classical violin since age 8, following in the footsteps – and using, to this day, the violin bow – of her grandfather, a professional classical violinist in Salzburg, Austria. On a family camping trip she heard someone play fiddle music for the first time.

Later, she recalls, “my parents bought me this old record. I think they thought it was cute. It was called ‘Learn To Play Old-Time Fiddle’. But I learned every tune on the record! Then in ninth grade I went to a party where Irish music was being played, and I loved it.” Her classical violin teacher didn’t mind as long as it got her to practice.

Fox fenced competitively for four years at Harvard University, where she studied chemistry. She went on to a master’s in geology at Dartmouth College, then found a job at Middlebury Union High School where she taught Earth Science for seven years. She loved the classroom, but found the time demands overwhelming. “I have a lot of respect for anyone who’s teaching. You take your work and the anxiety home with you. I wanted to spend more time with fencing and music,” she says. In 1992, she quit teaching to try living by the sword and the bow. “I got back to what I loved most when I was twelve,” she says.

Another summer camp experience soon changed her life. In 1993, a mutual acquaintance working as the music director for the Pinewoods Dance Camp in Plymouth, Massachusetts hired Fox and a handsome fiddler from the U.K. named Pete MacFarland to play for Scottish dance week. The two have been playing together ever since, and their twin-fiddle sound became Atlantic Crossing’s unique signature. Their marriage two summers ago, settling into a cozy house in Addison with several furry critters and a wood stove, was a natural extension of their creative harmony.

Together with multi-instrumentalist Brian Perkins and guitar-playing singer Rick Klein, Atlantic Crossing has grown to be arguably Vermont’s most in-demand contradance band. Their repertoire includes songs and instrumental music of New England, Quebec, Maritime Canada, and the British Isles, as well as original material inspired by these musical traditions. All four members also compose songs, with Pete concentrating on unique fiddle tunes, and Fox penning lively ballads and story-songs often based on Vermont history.

On Turning the Compass, her swingy “Rumrunner Blues” illustrates prohibition-era Vermont, and “MacDonough’s Fleet,” composed with support from the Champlain Maritime Museum at Basin Harbor in Ferrisburgh, relates the story of the construction of ships in Vergennes during the Revolutionary War. The fleet was used to preclude British occupation of Lake Champlain.

Fox starts composing with a story. “We did a concert at Mount Independence last summer,” she recalls, “and the guy there said, ‘Can you write us a song?’ I said, 'I can’t just write a song about Mount Independence. Send me one man’s story and I’ll give it a shot.' So he did: he sent me the journal of a man from Guilford. And reading through it, I was struck by how this man had the same problems as many people in the service today. Bad equipment, complaints about the higher-ups – he had smallpox so he was brought here to a hospital barracks, and his father hired a replacement for him down in New York and the father came all the way up here with the replacement. Then the guy came home and had PTSD, and he latched onto the temperance movement and got involved in that.”

Completing this song is just one of the projects on the burner for the coming winter, when the band ‘woodsheds,’ taking a break from the hectic summer dance and festival schedule to develop new material. In addition to original compositions, this work includes helping to bring to life the Helen Hartness Flanders Collection of historical Vermont music, which is housed at the Middlebury College music library.

“Other notable Vermont musicians like Pete Sutherland and Margaret McArthur have used the collection and we figured we should as well,” Fox says. “We look through these huge indexes looking for songs about everyday life. There are thousands of songs in the collection and we peruse the titles, looking for Civil War era songs or just songs about ordinary things. Then you pull up the song from the title index and listen.”

The work is time consuming and tedious. “It’s difficult to listen,” she says. “They are very poor quality recordings and often poor singing as well. They are all on cassettes that really need replacement. When we find something we like, often we can’t hear all the words and we do take liberties of filling in here and there, with what we consider would be a plausible substitute. We listen to different versions of the same song and try to see what we can piece together. And we adapt the songs to modern listeners. People don’t listen to 20-minute ballads anymore.”

In addition to expecting shorter ballads, technology has changed much about the way people listen to music, which raises new challenges to folk and roots groups playing historical music. “With the changes in technology today, now that people are downloading individual songs and don’t even have the liner notes on a CD or album, the songs have to stand on their own,” Fox explains. “But our music is really better when you know the context. In a live performance we can tell the story, explain where the events in the song come in. If you download it alone off iTunes or whatever, it loses some of its meaning.”

On stage, Fox often works as the group’s front (wo)man, providing not only that essential context for their stories but developing rapport with the audience. “I’m a terrible singer,” she says earnestly. “My 11th grade music teacher told me I had no talent and I believed her. So I tell jokes instead.”

Adaptability and playing to her strengths has also buoyed Fox’s notable fencing career, leading her to victories in the U.S. Fencing Association’s divisional level (Vermont, New Hampshire, Maine) and sectional competition (all six New England states and New York).

“My strongest point in fencing? I’m crafty,” she says. “And my timing. You become a lot cagier as you get older. There’s a long competitive life in this sport. You do have to retain your explosive speed, and some people lose that after a certain age. But if you push yourself, you can compete well into your forties and fifties.” Fox still competes, but for fun rather than trophies. “I go to tournaments just so I can get the chance to fence; I’m always teaching and otherwise don’t get an opportunity.”

Coaching has added a new dimension to her sport. “You have to be very analytical about why you do things. I’ve gained a lot of insight. I come home after a meet and think about why a student did particularly well or poorly, and suddenly I understand something new that I hadn’t thought about before.”

Fox has 60 to 75 fencing students at a time between the programs she runs in Charlotte and Middlebury. Among those are her “junior team” of a dozen scholarship-program students. “They have to be very serious competitors,” she says. “They have to work hard, officiate at meets, mend equipment, and assist with coaching beginners. They take a leadership role and make the whole Fencing Alliance work.” And it has worked impressively: last year, two of her junior team fencers made the top 16 in the Junior Olympics national championship of fencing. “For some kids from Vermont to do that well was previously unheard of,” she says proudly.

The success of her fencing students, Atlantic Crossing’s growing critical acclaim and international radio play of their latest album bring Fox back to that core summer-camp happiness. “The worst advice my parents ever gave me was that you can’t make a living playing music. Then again, my idea of what a living is may be different than theirs,” she says. “ But I have everything I need, and most of what I want.”

For more about Viveka Fox’s fencing and fiddling, visit www.greenmountainaccess.net/~vfox and www.atlanticcrossingvt.com

Cindy Ellen Hill, herself a musician, lives in Middlebury.

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