When playing with Davis-based, Irish band Paddy on the Binge, there’s a moment when the music falls into sync for fiddler and banjoist Emma Ware. It’s not just when the musical elements — the melody, the rhythm, the beat and so forth — align, it’s when the players themselves align. As the strings and flutes sound around one another, it’s as if the musicians are anticipating and replying to the notes and chords uttered by each other’s instruments. In those moments, it’s as if the band is in a state of flow.
“Nothing else matters,” said Ware, a UC Davis graduate student in the Atmospheric Sciences Graduate Group and an alum of the Department of Physics and Astronomy. “We know each other so well musically at this point that we already know where everyone else is going.”
In celebration of St. Patrick’s Day, Paddy on the Binge will play a concert featuring traditional Irish tunes Saturday, March 15 at Central Park in Davis. The show will run from 6 to 9 p.m. on the south side of the park. Whimsical, danceable and upbeat, Paddy on the Binge’s music transports listeners to the open spaces of the Emerald Isle while remaining intimate.
For Ware, playing traditional Irish music with Paddy on the Binge is a happy place.
“Irish music, it hits my brain really well,” she said. “There’s some super magical moments and we’ll have plenty of those moments on Saturday.”
Finding a passion for Irish traditional music
For nearly a decade, Ware played classical and orchestra music, but the formal nature of the genres deterred her interest in them. Irish traditional music, however, felt like the antithesis of that. The music was lively, free and unbidden by formalities.
After learning a few tunes from friends in high school, Ware was hooked and started shifting her playing style to fit the genre. When she moved to Davis in 2018 for her undergraduate studies, she was introduced to Paddy on the Binge and joined in the Irish traditional music sessions here, informal gatherings in which community members play and listen to Irish traditional music.
“It took me a long time to sound like I was an Irish player,” said Ware, noting that the violin and fiddle are the same instrument. She likened shifting genres to learning a new language. “It takes a long time to sound like a native speaker.”
Ware officially became a bandmember of Paddy on the Binge in 2021.
Head in the clouds
While Ware will be in Davis for St. Patrick’s Day weekend, she currently lives in Kraków, Poland, conducting research on cloud physics at the AGH University of Science and Technology. Specifically, Ware is developing computational models that simulate cloud microphysics to better understand rain formation. Creating models of such small-scale dynamics will help improve large-scale models used to predict weather and climate change.
“Weather is really interesting from a physics perspective,” Ware said. “In most of physical reality, there’s this interplay of things moving towards an equilibrium, but with weather, there is no stable equilibrium. It’s too big and too complicated, and everything offsets something else or tugs it in a different direction. It’s all very chaotic.”
Ware described clouds as the “one of the final frontiers in climate modeling” due to how their behavior has many contrasting effects on the rest of the system, including the Earth’s radiation budget as well as other atmospheric conditions.
“The small scale of what clouds look like and how they behave is still really hard to get accurate,” she added. “It’s one of the biggest uncertainty parameters in large-scale climate and weather models.”
While Ware is entrenched in her research work, she’s excited for the trip back to Davis to participate in the local St. Patrick’s Day festivities.
“Playing a concert in Davis’ Central Park felt like an insane pipe dream,” she said.
This Saturday, that dream becomes a reality.
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