Fiddling prodigies team up to win
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In 2009, Alina Geslison and Grace Dayton can say they're the best pair of fiddlers in the nation.
That's because Alina, a BYU-bound 17-year-old from the Provo Utah Bonneville Stake, and Grace, a Mia Maid in the Pleasant Grove Utah East Stake, won the 2009 National Old-time Twin Fiddling contest last month in Weiser, Idaho.
The competition — open to fiddlers of all ages — required each entering pair to play two songs. For Alina and Grace, the selections were "Josephine's Waltz" and "Nicaraguan."
Alina's and Grace's victory surprised even them. This year was the first time the duo competed in Twin Fiddling at nationals. The competition was formidable: the second-place team in Twin Fiddling comprised the individual Grand Champion winner (i.e. de facto "best fiddler in the world"), Kimber Ludiker, and her brother Dennis. Finally, the selections they played are, according to Alina, "numbers you wouldn't normally hear at a competition like this."
"I was thinking we didn't have a chance," Alina said. "We thought we would go up and have fun and see how we did. We were really surprised."
"We were in shock, actually," Grace added.
The day before winning the team fiddling title, Grace placed 7th and Alina took 9th in the Junior Division individual competition.
Before they were born
The foundation for an Alina-and-Grace pairing was laid long before the young women were born. That's because Alina's father, Mark Geslison, and Grace's mother, Amy Robertson Dayton, attended high school together in Spanish Fork, Utah.
Both Brother Geslison, who directs the folk music program at BYU, and Sister Dayton, a first-grade teacher, remained in their native Utah County as adults. Eventually they reconnected and realized they had similarly aged daughters who excelled in violin and fiddling. Alina took up violin at age 5 and fiddle at 8; Grace began violin at 3 and started fiddling at 9.
Their two families began caravaning to fiddling competitions and even vacationed together.
Violin or fiddle?
Fiddling is done with violins, yet Alina and Grace both distinguish their fiddling from time spent playing classical violin pieces. So what's the difference?
"It's what you play," Alina explains. "Violin is classical music – Mozart, Bach, that sort of thing. Fiddling is like bluegrass, jazz and swing music. At the contest that we won, the style is considered Old-time and Texas Swing."
Grace succinctly summarized the difference: "The violin sings and the fiddle dances."
