About Us
carlasciaky.com
Carla on MySpace
I was born into a family of folk music lovers. My father is a long-time fan of old-timey and bluegrass music and my mother, as a New York City teenager, sang with a group that performed folk songs on a weekly radio show and hung out with the likes of Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie back in the 1940s. By the age of two, I was singing the songs that my mother and the record player sang to me, songs I still remember well.
My mother started me on piano at age seven, and the Boulder, Colorado public school system began my violin training the summer following third grade. For my eleventh birthday I received a soprano recorder and the von Trapp instruction book, which started my journey into early music. And three years later, during my first (of two) summers at my grandmother’s small culture camp in Oaxaca, Mexico, I received the gift of a guitar. It was a classical guitar, made in a Mexico City factory. My memory is that it cost $24. Surrounded by other American teenage girls who already played guitar, and tutored by an often intoxicated and very sentimental Oaxacan folksinger, I began to compile a lifelong repertoire.
While still in high school, a friend and I formed the band Propinquity,
which eventually recorded an album in 1972 (re-released on cd in late 2007
— www.numerogroup.com) and did some touring of the college circuit. Returning to the
University of Colorado to finish my liberal arts bachelor’s degree,
I added to my musical menagerie while performing 
pre-Baroque
music with the Collegium Musicum. Following college I stayed with early
music for three more years in the Dufay Consort. When my group needed
a logo and promotional material, we turned to a Denver folk music and
graphic arts fixture, Hal Aqua.
In the meantime I had begun to write songs and give small solo folk concerts in the Denver area. After the Dufay Consort broke up, I quit my day job as a bookkeeper and turned all my energy to a career in the folk world. Being too afraid of rejection by the major folk labels, I chose to create my own, with the guidance of the blessed Diane Sward Rapaport book, How to Make and Sell Your Own Recording. In 1982 I released my first album (vinyl) on Propinquity Records, later adding several more to the catalog, and eventually I was accepted by the wonderful label, Green Linnet, a delayed but very welcome endorsement of my work. Hal tastefully provided the graphics for almost all of my projects. I was fortunate enough to be a member of the local cult women’s group the Mother Folkers for twelve years. And I learned a lot of US geography, frequenting most of the interstates to perform at folk venues in over thirty states for twelve years or so, first by myself, soon with my husband Dan as roadie, agent, and manager, and later, with our first daughter Chloe.
After we had our second daughter Rachel, I managed to survive a sort of mid-life/identity crisis, and my life is now centered around family, our kids’ Waldorf school, my Jewish community, and my love of music, rather than a music career. Somewhere in the middle of the identity crisis I began to play music in the synagogue with my old friend Hal Aqua, which led to playing music together outside the synagogue, like Beatles songs. And performing Irish music with fellow musician Miriam Rosenblum at occasional Swallow Hill Music Association (Denver’s main folk music school and concert venue) events, led to the two of us asking Miriam to join us for a concert in the spring of 2006. So now I get to admire Hal’s prowess on the many strings he strums and Miriam’s virtuosic wind and reed work while singing some of my favorite songs of all times! A pretty blissful way to live!
In addition to playing in the Folkaltones, I play Baroque violin in the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado (www.bcocolorado.org), teach private lessons, sing folk songs with several classes and direct two early music ensembles at the Denver Waldorf School, and play with Hal and Miriam and several others in the Jewish world beat band Los Lantzmun (www.hotjewishmusic.com). Dan and I are fanatics in the areas of organic and locally produced food and the raw milk movement, and we serve as chauffeurs for Chloe and Rachel’s many activities, both passion-filled and obligatory. And we all dote on our goofy-looking and incredibly sweet labradoodle Bella.
