There are not many concerts in New Hampshire, or anywhere else, where the marquee instrument is a hand-cranked wooden wheel rubbing against rosined strings. But that is exactly what audiences will hear on Sunday, October 4, when the duo RamaLisa performs at 4 p.m. at the Unitarian Universalist Church in Laconia, at 172 Pleasant Street.
RamaLisa is violinist Shelby Trevor and hurdy-gurdy artist Noelle Beaudin, two New Hampshire musicians who have built a small, unlikely body of work around an instrument most listeners have never seen played live. The hurdy-gurdy is a string instrument that produces sound by means of a hand-cranked, rosined wheel that bows the strings, with keys pressed by the player's other hand to change pitch. It is centuries old — its ancestors reach back to the medieval period — and it has long carried a double reputation: a rustic folk instrument in the French and Occitan traditions, and, in some circles, a curiosity. Beaudin has spent much of her career arguing, through composition, that it can be a contemporary voice.
That argument is at the center of RamaLisa. The duo's own description of its music is deliberately wide: classical chamber music, folk traditions, mythology, nature, and "even the occasional touch of metal and humor." Trevor's violin supplies the singing, lyrical line; Beaudin's hurdy-gurdy supplies a drone and a buzz that no violin alone can make. The combination is closer to a small consort than to a typical folk act — two melody instruments, one of them essentially a mechanical bow, playing original compositions and arrangements rather than standards.
The October 4 concert is billed as an intimate one, with a program devoted to the duo's original material. "We love playing in intimate spaces where people can really hear the details in the music," the pair said in announcing the show. "This concert is an opportunity to share the music we have created together in a setting that feels personal and immediate." That setting is a fitting one. The Unitarian Universalist Society of Laconia traces its congregation to 1838, when the First Universalist Society was organized by twenty-three charter members; its first meeting house stood on Union Avenue. The society reorganized as the First Unitarian Society in 1867 and built a downtown church at Main and Hanover streets that served as a community landmark until it burned in 1938. The present building on Pleasant Street was dedicated on September 22, 1940, and the congregation took its current name in 1961, after the national merger of the American Unitarian Association and the Universalist Church of America. In 1995 the society voted to become a welcoming congregation. It is, in other words, a room with a long history of hosting things that do not fit neatly into a single tradition — which is more or less RamaLisa's specialty.
The duo arrives in Laconia in the middle of a busy stretch. RamaLisa is scheduled to appear on the Cold River Radio Show, the New England variety program hosted by Jonathan Sarty and recorded live before a studio audience; the show spotlights regional artists. The Laconia concert follows that appearance and the release of new recorded music.
The recorded music is where RamaLisa's origin story actually begins. The project grew out of Beaudin's album ANIMAL, released July 1, 2026, under her own name. Trevor is featured on that record as a collaborative artist, and the partnership that formed during its making became RamaLisa. Beaudin's earlier solo work, released under the project name Death by Gurdy, includes the album Savage — eleven tracks that she describes, with characteristic understatement, as "beautiful and weird," built from several hurdy-gurdies, a Wurlitzer, piano, and whatever else was at hand, stirred together into something like progressive rock. Her debut, SAVAGE, and its follow-up established her as one of the more visible advocates for the instrument in the region.
Beaudin's path to the hurdy-gurdy was not a straight line. She studied composition and piano performance at the Boston Conservatory, then continued her work in the United Kingdom and France. For a time she was active as a Cape Breton accompanist, and it was through Bal Folk — the participatory French folk-dance tradition — that she first encountered the hurdy-gurdy. She now focuses primarily on writing for the instrument, with published pieces and multiple albums to her name, and she runs GurdyWorld, a resource site for hurdy-gurdy players that she began building in August 2022 after recognizing that such a niche instrument lacked a single organized home online. She is also a pianist and music educator based in Sandwich, New Hampshire.
Trevor, for his part, is a violinist, composer, educator, and arts leader whose work spans classical, folk, experimental, and improvisation-driven music. He lives in the wilderness of North Sandwich, and his compositions have been performed by RamaLisa, East Mill Outcry, the Longy School of Music Composition Department, the Rossini Club Concert Series, and the When Notes Fly concert series. His own description of RamaLisa calls it a "narrative-driven, genre-crossing sound world" that draws on early music influences alongside folk, classical, metal, and neo-classical. The two have also performed together in looser configurations — a May 2026 program at the Geneva Point Center in Moultonborough paired Trevor and friends, including Beaudin, in an evening of Bach and original chamber music.
That range is the point. A program of original compositions for violin and hurdy-gurdy can move from something that sounds like a Baroque dance to something that sounds like a folk lament to something with the rhythmic push of amplified music, without ever changing instruments. The duo's stated territory — "between ancient and modern, delicate and fierce, familiar and strange" — is not marketing filler so much as a description of what the instrumentation forces on a composer. The hurdy-gurdy's wheel produces a continuous, slightly gritty drone under everything; the violin can soar over it or dig into it. There is no hiding in a duo, and there is even less hiding in a church sanctuary with a small audience.
Tickets and additional information for the October 4 concert are available through the Unitarian Universalist Society of Laconia at uulaconia.org, by email at [email protected], or by phone at 603-848-2469. The performance runs from 4 to 5 p.m. For anyone curious about what a medieval instrument sounds like in the hands of a contemporary composer — or simply looking for an hour of chamber music that does not sound like any other chamber music in the Lakes Region — it is a rare chance to hear it up close.