Biography
Read the long versionThe short version
Carla Sciaky is a multi-instrumentalist-folksinger-songwriter based in Denver, Colorado. She toured the US extensively throughout the 1980s and 90s, recording first on her own Propinquity Records and later on Green Linnet and Alacazam Records, compiling a discography of eight solo albums and appearing on many group efforts, compilations, and colleagues' collections. Her songwriting won her awards and/or recognition in such arenas as the Kerrville New Song Competition, the Louisville, Kentucky songwriting competition, the Colorado Arts and Humanities Fellowship for Composition, the Billboard Songwriting Competition and the Utah and Kansas Artist in Residence programs in the schools. Westword Magazine proclaimed her "Best Folkie" in their 1987 "Best of" edition, and her best known song, written on the shore of Lake Superior, "Under the Quarter Moon" has been selected more than once for Minnesota Public Radio compilations and recorded and performed by countless fellow folksingers, choirs, and campfire circles.
"Music and silence ... combine strongly because music is done with silence, and silence is full of music."
After taking ten years off to raise her children and have a midlife crisis, Carla is performing again. In the folk world, she is staying close to home and working with her new trio, the Trifolkals, with Miriam Rosenblum and Hal Aqua. She plays accordion and violin and sings with Los Lantzmun, a Colorado-based Jewish world-beat band. With great pride and joy, she has been playing Baroque violin with the Baroque Chamber Orchestra of Colorado, a thirteen-member ensemble now in its third season. And she is singing folk songs and directing early (Renaissance and Medieval) music with several grades at her kids' Waldorf school.
Outside of music, she is deeply committed to the world of alternative medicine, exploring energy healing and EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique), working on natural vision improvement (hoping to teach it to others someday), and taking lessons in the Alexander Technique. She and her husband Dan, married twenty-four years this spring, are passionate about Waldorf education, the raw milk movement, community supported agriculture, and organic and gourmet cuisine. Together with their two daughters Chloe and Rachel, they attend Irish stepdancing performances and competitions and violin classes and performances, and coddle their adorable three-year-old labradoodle Bella.
The long version
the early years...
I have a memory, on a visceral level, of the deep and full pleasure I experienced as a young child while singing songs with my mother. In her childhood, my mother took piano lessons and attended summer camps in the Catskills where one activity was to go out with folklorists to collect traditional ballads from the families in the hills. As a teen she went contra dancing and sang with a group of kids under Margot Mayo, who directed them on a weekly radio program in New York City. Once she was a camp counselor (at High Peak, just outside of Catskill, New York, owned and run by my father's parents, leading to the momentous – for me – moment of meeting my father) and later a nursery school teacher, she sang with the kids in her charge. It was only natural that she would sing to me once I came along, after I had enjoyed my in utero serenades offered by her and her students. I still remember some of the songs from my very early childhood, as well as the many records we listened to together in our Brooklyn apartment.
piano, violin, recorder...
When I was five we moved to Boulder, Colorado, with our Steinway spinet. Occasionally my mother would sit down at the piano and draw out of the keys what was to me a wondrous weaving of melodies, rhythms and harmonies. 
I begged her to teach me until finally, one day in first grade, she brought home a John Thompson book and began to lead me through it. My aim was to play with both hands as she did. The (Princess?) Waltz at the end of the book was my first major accomplishment, after some months of plodding through the less interesting single melodies. By third grade I moved on to private lessons, then added violin that summer through a wonderful public school instrumental music program.
A cousin of my father's sent me her old soprano recorder for my eleventh birthday. My father pulled out his old (matching) recorder, and together we navigated the von Trapp Family instruction book. He eventually put his instrument away again, but I never did. My goal on recorder was "Jesu Joy of Man's Desiring" at the end of the von Trapp book, and that one took me years!
guitar...
I spent the summers of my fifteenth and sixteenth years in Oaxaca, Mexico, where my father's parents had retired after leaving High Peak the year I was born. The first day in Mexico, my grandmother took me to a guitar factory and bought me a guitar. I think it cost $24. Her home (my grandfather died when I was four) in Oaxaca served as a culture camp for fifteen American teenage girls every summer, and during my two summers there I learned to play, and amassed the beginning of a lifelong repertoire of songs. Returning home to Boulder, I connected with my friend Debby Booton, who along with her two older sisters was learning guitar from a PBS instructional series. She taught me what she was learning and I taught her my songs and we formed our first band, "The Reign," along with my best friend, Nonny Smith, and another schoolmate, Beth Giesler. Our first song was "What Have They Done to the Rain?" and we placed second in the junior high division of the Stars of Tomorrow Show in Boulder.
Within a few months I was taking lessons from Joe Jackson, who fronted a band called "The Lovin' Sound" three nights a week at the Hungry Farmer, a local family restaurant chain. Joe would have me come up on stage and sit in on a song or two, and even fill in for the one woman in the band, Sue Poore, when she had the night off. 
I auditioned and got accepted into Sing In at Boulder High School, the school folk song club that put on a performance each spring. In the fall of 1970, I was asked to sing at a Democratic Party rally for Rich Gebhardt, a local congressional candidate, and George McGovern. I asked Mel Stonebraker, one of my fellow Sing In performers, to join me. We worked up a small repertoire and gathered steam over the coming months by adding two more Sing In alums, Pat Hubbard and Julie Johnson, and were offered our own night at the Hungry Farmer. We named ourselves Propinquity, after the Michael Nesmith song made popular by the Nitty Gritty Dirt Band, and, when Julie went off to Stanford, we added two friends, drummer Jeff Harper and guitarist, pianist and singer/songwriter Jason Potter. Sing In had put out a record each year on the local label Owl Records, owned and run by our patron Oak Thorne, and so Propinquity followed suit and produced a self-titled record to add to the catalog. This album was re-released by the sainted Rob Sevier in the fall of 2007 on the Asterisk series of the Numero Group label.
college and early music...
After three fulfilling and successful years together, Propinquity broke up in 1973. I returned to college at the University of Colorado in Boulder. I worked as hostess, cashier, waitress, cocktail waitress and bartender at Tico's, Clyde Canino and Warren Fabrizio's downtown Boulder Mexican family restaurant, and haven for artistic and intellectual employees. During those years I happened upon (and attended) a recorder class in the CU summer catalog, and ended up being invited into the Collegium Musicum, a university chamber group specializing in the repertoire of medieval, renaissance, and Baroque music on period instruments, under director Gordon Sandford. There I added rebec, viola da gamba, krumhorn, cornemuse, and gemshorn to my instrumental menagerie. To this day, I bless Dr. Sandford for the way in which he shared his passion for early music with us.
In 1977, I graduated from CU with a BA in Liberal Arts, having constructed my own major in Urban Studies. I was invited to join the Denver Early Music Ensemble, which very quickly re-organized and morphed into a quartet and eventually a trio called the Dufay Consort. To be able to rehearse the four or more evenings a week, I moved to Denver, got a day job as a bookkeeper, and settled into a new busy life. We debuted at Carnegie Recital Hall in March, 1980, were looking toward a bright future with possible record contracts in the works, and developing a huge following in Denver. I gave notice at my day job. The month I left it to become a full-time musician, the Dufay Consort broke up. This could have made things look pretty bleak, but as they say, as the one door closed, another had already been opening up along the way.
going solo...
Ever since Propinquity's quiet end, I had begun to write more songs and, perhaps more significantly, had been developing ideas of how I could put set lists together, how I could introduce songs, themes I could use to tie songs together, and more and more dreaming and concocting. I had never performed by myself before, so this was a whole new universe to consider. Having attended concerts with my boyfriend at the Denver Folklore Center, I decided to perform on hoot night there. The policy was three songs or fifteen minutes, pay or play. I was simultaneously completely terrified and, oddly, utterly confident about this idea. To give myself a feeling of safety, I waited until my boyfriend was out of town, told none of my friends, and attended a hoot night all by myself, as an audience member. I sat in the back and watched one dismal amateur after another and knew I was going to be okay. The following week I took my guitar and sang my three songs. When I got off the stage, the concert manager asked me if I would like to split a concert night with another act. My first solo performance was November 16, 1978, sharing the bill with an instrumental duo called Mendel.
The day of our show, I woke up beside myself with anxiety. I went to my day job with my stomach churning and my insides quaking, wondering how I was going to make it to 8:00. The little voice in my head spoke to me like a broken record: “Who the hell do you think you are to think people are going to want to come and hear you play?” Heaven only knows how I did make it through that day, but the moment I walked into the hall that evening, it completely melted away. I knew I was in the right place, and I had a magical, fantastic experience on the stage that night.
By the time the Dufay Consort met its sudden disintegration and I had left my day job, I had been performing several solo concerts a year, at the Swallow Hill Music Association, which is the non-profit group formed from the re-organized Denver Folklore Center, and at a variety of other venues throughout Colorado. I had also started teaching several private students at home and at the Swallow Hill Music School. As a full-time musician, I took on more students, and started looking at the frontiers of recording and touring.
More to come. Please check back soon.
back to top