WEEKEND: Centrum Festival of American Fiddle Tunes to feature performances today, Saturday

PORT TOWNSEND — Christine Balfa was quaking in her boots, just a little.

Never mind that she’s been coming to Centrum’s Festival of American Fiddle Tunes since she was a grade-schooler.

Never mind that she is nationally known as a teacher of Cajun music and culture at festivals such as this.

The daughter of the late Cajun master Dewey Balfa, she is a singer and multi-instrumentalist with nine albums to her credit.

But earlier this week, amidst the workshops at Fort Worden State Park, Fiddle Tunes artistic director Suzy Thompson asked her to do something she’s not all that comfortable with: teach a fiddle class.

“I’ve had a love-hate relationship with the fiddle all my life,” Balfa said.

She’s in her element while singing.

But the fiddle would frustrate because what she had in her head wasn’t coming out on those strings.

Balfa could not, however, tell Thompson no. She’s known the Fiddle Tunes director since Balfa was a girl of 5.

So you know what? “I’m just going to go for it,” and tell the class she’s learning right along with them.

Sure, you’re vulnerable. But “if you’re staying in your safe zone, you’re not really living,” said Balfa.

Along with more than 30 faculty members and 300 students, she’s living it up at Fiddle Tunes.

After a week of classes, jams, band labs and dances, the festival culminates in three public performances at McCurdy Pavilion, the big hall at Fort Worden State Park.

Today’s 1:30 p.m. “Fiddles on Fire” concert brings together 12 artists from two continents: Kentucky’s Bruce Greene and John Haywood; Denmark’s Kristian Bugge, Morten Alfred Hoirup and Sonnich Lydom; Lisa Ornstein, Andre Marchand and Normand Miron of Quebec, Canada; Shaye Cohn and John James of New Orleans and New England’s Sandy Bradley and Rodney Miller.

Miller, a National Endowment for the Arts-designated Master Fiddler and New Hampshire’s state artist laureate, calls Fiddle Tunes plain amazing, an experience where he feels “surrounded, welcomed and encouraged.”

He urges the uninitiated to come to the concerts, which will travel around the globe as well as back and forth in time. The tunes, Miller said, range from originals, straight from his own head and heart, to traditionals more than a century old.

In this place, “the music is very powerful,” he said.

“It’s just a rich heritage the world has.”

Public performance No. 2, titled “North and South,” comes to McCurdy Pavilion at 7:30 tonight. It promises more roaming: to Ireland with fiddler Brian Conway, his sister Rose Conway Flanagan and Mark Simos; down to Georgia with Frank Maloy and Mick Kinney; to the West Coast with Ruthie Dornfeld, Jody Stecher and Kate Brislin; to Scotland with Calum MacKinnon and Lisa Scott and to Louisiana with Cajun artists Anya Burgess, Kristi Guillory, Christine Balfa and friends.

“Such a variety of fiddle music, I have never come across in my life,” said Flanagan, who grew up in the Bronx, N.Y., and now lives in the fiercely Irish-American community of Pearl River, N.Y.

“Everyone is so good. It’s really intimidating,” added the fiddler, who is humble despite her biography.

She teaches at the Pearl River School of Irish Music and at fiddle camps from Alaska to Baltimore to Sligo, Ireland. As a performer, she plays in ensembles including the Green Gates Ceili Band and on “Forget Me Not,” her debut album with flutist Laura Byrne.

Oh, and she was inducted two years ago into the international Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (“Gathering of Irish Musicians”) hall of fame.

At Fiddle Tunes, Flanagan relishes the fact that musicians from varying genres take her classes; there were nearly 60 in one session.

They come to learn triplets and stutters and “ways to make their Irish fiddle tunes sound more Irish,” she said.

“I show them different techniques, like holding on to a note before going on to the next . . . or sliding down out of the note. That gives it a little more mournful sound.”

Such nuance is key, obviously, but mournful will not be the feeling Saturday at Fiddle Tunes’ Independence Day finale. The 1:30 p.m. Fiddles on the Fourth concert, again at McCurdy Pavilion, will be a party with music from across North America:

Kinnon and Betty Lou Beaton from Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Vesta Johnson and Steve Hall from Missouri, Suzy Thompson and friends from California; bluegrass artists Billy Baker with Jack Hinshelwood and friends and Don Pedro, Miguel and Hermenegildo Dimas from Michoacan, Mexico.

Thompson, artistic director of Fiddle Tunes for 15 years now, bowed to her fellow musicians.

“The joy and generosity with which our faculty shares their music with us and with each other,” she said, “continues to amaze me.”