Peter Ostroushko, MandolIndy
Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis
Saturday, Oct. 13, 7 p.m., $15, all-ages

Mandolin workshop with Peter Ostroushko, Arkadiy Yushkin
Unitarian Universalist Church of Indianapolis
Sunday, Oct. 14, 1:30 p.m., $20
www.indyfolkseries.org

The Indy Folk Series will host Peter Ostroushko in another of their coffeehouse-style concerts at the Unitarian Universalist Church near the Butler campus Oct. 13.

Ostroushko, an accomplished mandolin and fiddle player, an acoustic-music bulwark on “A Prairie Home Companion” and a composer who regularly performs on a Minneapolis-based radio variety show, calls his mélange of domestic (bluegrass, swing, ragtime) and international (mainly Eastern European and Irish) inspirations “slüz düz,” a Ukrainian phrase his mother taught him, roughly translating to “off his rocker.”

Ostroushko estimates 80 percent of the concert will draw on material amassed through 15 albums, and the rest “could be anything from Brazilian, French or Ukrainian music, to Bob Dylan, or whatever strikes my fancy.” That Emmy for his score to the 2005 documentary “Minnesota: A History of the Land” recognized just one of his soundtracks to Minnesota and the Midwest: His three-album “Heartland Trilogy,” completed in 2000, sketches his homeland with the elegance of Aaron Copland and the mandolin virtuosity of Bill Monroe. His 2005 score to a musical about Minnesota’s Great Hinckley Fire, “FireBall,” was “a mammoth project,” Ostroushko says, and after all that recent work, he’s taken this year off from writing.

Opening will be MandolIndy, a local ensemble consisting of two mandolins, mandola (viola tuning), octave guitar and bass. Mandolin orchestras first appeared around the turn of the century as promotion for the Gibson brand, replacing traditional orchestral strings with the mandolin, mandola, mandocello and mandolbass. Most contemporary mandolin orchestras drop the mandolbass — “a big, cumbersome, odd-looking instrument that doesn’t sound very good,” according to MandolIndy’s James Todd, but they’ve maintained similar instrumentation, outliving their original mission as an advertising campaign.

Formed in 2004, MandolIndy plays a repertoire of both ragtime-based, century-old literature and new arrangements that draw from bluegrass and jazz.

Ostroushko will also give a mandolin workshop on Sunday, Oct. 14 from 1:30 until 3 p.m. at the church, teaching his “Guaranteed to Improve Your Technique by 100 Percent” program. Ostroushko says, “I’m going to be doing my best to enlighten people about playing an instrument that’s nearly impossible to get in tune and has absolutely no respect in the world.”