Announcing a 'new' instructor for 2025: Marya Katz!

 Marya taught public school music for 33 years before retiring in 2009. She earned National Board Certification in Early/Middle Childhood Music in 2002. Currently, she teaches private dulcimer lessons, directs the adult choir at her church, and enjoys performing with the folk group Simple Gifts of the Blue Ridge. With this group, she appears on 5 CDs of an eclectic mix of traditional Appalachian music, Celtic, New Age, Christmas music, and more. She has also produced 9 self-published books encompassing original compositions, basic theory, and arrangements of traditional music for the hammered dulcimer. Several of her original tunes have been featured in Dulcimer Players News.

Butch Ross has been gleefully smashing disparate genres of music together for over ten years. Using the mountain dulcimer as a prism, he has used the instrument to conquer everything from Bach to the Beatles to Radiohead (and everything in between).

His restless musical curiosity and virtuosity, coupled with his innate ability to break complex concepts into simple ideas, have made him an in-demand teacher and performer at many folk and dulcimer festivals both in the States and abroad.

He also plays guitar and Ukulele and is a regular contributor to the Dulcimer Players News.

Now based in North Carolina, Ken Bloom has been a professional musician all his life and has had experience playing in a wide range of circumstances.  Traditional music from this country as well as many other parts of the world has been a keen interest of Ken’s for decades.  He was trained in woodwork by his father from an early age, and Ken now devotes much of his time to building bowed dulcimers as well as several other instruments.  He developed the bowed dulcimers he is now building from the older traditional ones, some dating back centuries.  Performing has also been a very important part of Ken’s musical life, and he has done so in several countries and at many festivals all over North America.