Fiddle tunes

Uilleann Pipes
1

Or, as I used to call them, &*$^_! fiddle tunes. :swear: Used to do my best to ignore them, or complain bitterly when everyone else was done with their Found Harmonium Music. Thank God they seem to have forgotten about that piece of junk nonsense out here in Kevin Burke Land.

About 10 years ago I took up the fiddle, can’t beat 'em join 'em after all. I’d switch to that when the A major etc began. Still do, or would rather, since I don’t bother playing the pipes in sessions much anymore, there’s just too much of these tunes with heaps of rolls on the back D. Lately I’ve begun playing the dreaded tenor banjo too; The people I play with like it more anyway; for one thing, they can hear it. The chanter tended to get swamped. But anyway I never liked trying to shoehorn the chanter into these tunes, even when it’s capable of doing so - it just doesn’t feel like it belongs there. Heaps of pipers around the world carry on anyway.

But, to me, the pipes seem a titch obsolete in Modern Irish Music. Maybe you could liken it to the clarinet, which was all the rage in jazz in the 20s and 30s but was thoroughly displaced by the sax in the 40s for various reasons; or the baroque or simple system flutes, which were made obsolete for art music by Boehm’s technical innovations, although of course they still found a home in Irish and Cuban music. But they’re passe now in classical, except of course for specialized period music played on correct instruments.

With the Irish pipes you had almost the complete majority of the dance music in the 18/19th centuries composed for the pipes or flute/whistle, with some leavings of fiddle music; but 20th century composers have largely turned that on its head, as well as regional fiddle tunes having more of an airing too, so while you’ll do fine with one tune in a set it’s quite likely the next one will be more than a bit tricky to play on the pipes, if not impossible, hence my abandoning ship, in groups at least.

Anyway, thought I’d air those grievances, or observations. Was wondering what the rest of you do - this subject hasn’t been discussed here before (!), surprisingly enough. I do have a thing about not wanting to just sit there and gather dust, btw. I’ll go out of my way to learn tunes friends like, even if they’re not exactly my cup of tea. I quite like the fiddle, banjo, box, and the tunes that were made specially for them, I should mention. There are other strategies for dealing with fiddle etc tunes too, whistles in C or E for Dmin and Amaj tunes, or getting the hang of the keyed flute, which is slightly more forgiving for playing those tunes than the chanter.

2

Where’ve you got that from, Kevin? I thought it was the exact opposite - it was my impression that the pipes were all but extinct by the end of the 19c, until the Gaelic League came along and promoted them and all things “Irish”. The fiddle, melodeon and concertina were far more common and widespread. Well, again, that was my impression. I’m going by things I’ve read on NPU and other sites, in the past.

And where’ve you got this from? Given the resurgence of interest in the uilleann pipes during the 20c, this seems at odds with the relative prevalence/importance of the pipes and fiddle.

3

Kevin,
if you are playing in sessions or groups where you have to turn to the Banjo so that the other musicians can hear you… well, God help you , is all I’d have to say!!

Good Luck,
Geoff.

4

I’m still taking the pipes and the keyless flute to the few sporadic sessions we attend. At home I’ll play a C chanter and/or the the D set. Bought a Gibson Les Paul electric guitar a couple of months ago to relive my 1960’s youth when I used to rock, but find I reach for the pipes or flute when I get home. The pipes are a fixed lifestyle now like reading, or going for a walk.

5

Maybe in Ireland, but there were a lot of pipers that Chief O’Neill knew and got tunes from, from about 1880 to 1920. No shortage of gigs for them, either, with plays and vaudeville type things going all around North America. I thought that it was during the 20th century, especially around the mid-point, that pipers reached their lowest point.

Possibly Kevin is referring specifically to “Modern Irish Music”, which, although it’s a nebulous term that may not even be able to be defined distinctly from the rest of the tradition, I’d probably agree with him about. But then I also know lots of pipers (including myself) who don’t shy away from many “fiddle” or “modern” tunes.

6

Anyone got an example of a modern fiddle tune? Just curious.
Surly its not a problem with whether a tune is modern or old, but rather the key its played in that makes it difficult for the pipes.
Or is it modern tunes exceed the two octaves available on a chanter?

7

I think a lot of it has to do with the way the tune is played, too. But like Nico, I don’t mind a good fiddle tune on the pipes. I remember the time I heard him knock out “Beare Island” (which might actually be a “box tune;” Finnbar Dwyer maybe? … but still, I wouldn’t think of it as a pipe tune) on the pipes and it was great!

Anyway, I’m much greener than most of you all, so maybe this is naive … but so far for me, sorting out a good way to play a fiddle tune on the pipes is half the fun. If there’s a like-minded fiddle player around, you can meet in the middle and make something your own. We’ve been playing a few American tunes lately, and I’m amazed at how nicely – and easily – many of them sit on the pipes. I really didn’t expect that.

I do however reserve the right to avoid most Reavy tunes. Just … can’t … quite … grok …

8

Key and range are two aspects, but also the movement around the notes may or may not be particularly chanter friendly. A to a is tough, but doable. I’d probably not want to bother with B to b, and definitely not anything that requires a leap from the bottom octave to c’, c#’ or d’.

Passages where there are notes in the second octave and a pedal note of cnat, B and A can be difficult (in decreasing order of difficulty). For example c2ecgcec is tricky, but c2eAgAeA is pretty straightforward. But A2gAaAgA might be tough (just as a randomly selected order of notes).

Cross-posting with Cathy: I wouldn’t play Beare Island on a keyless chanter, because I don’t like halfholing the G#, but otherwise it’s actually not too challenging of a tune. Dwyer and Reavy tunes can be quite doable on the pipes, and also extremely daunting. For Ed Reavy, Whistler of Rosslea is not terrible, even without making it super pipe friendly by replacing all the Fnats with F#s (which makes it completely straightforward). Ditto Shoemaker’s Daughter. But I’d never bother trying In Memory of Coleman on the pipes.

Recently I started taking Dm tunes that I love playing on flute and trying them on the pipes (I mean, if Joey does them, surely I can, too :smiley:). The only awkward part is putting the low Cnats up an octave and getting the Fnats right (Porthole of the Kelp, the fiddle version of the Broken Pledge, etc). Well maybe not the “only” :wink: They’re not as chanter friendly as they are flute friendly (provided you have keys), but they’re still doable.

I don’t know if I have a like-minded fiddler - I have an extremely fantastic fiddler who plays things fiddle-y and box-y and who can play things perfectly with pipers, too, but she’s got a great repertoire of tunes that aren’t the pipe friendly settings. So I either learn to do it, or I learn it on flute.

9

Anything by Ed Reavy, except maybe Love at the Endings and that barn dance, I’d call “Modern” or a fiddle tune. Reavy didn’t care for the pipes and his tunes are full of bass notes, chromatic bits, rolls/trebles on the middle D, wide intervals chanters can’t handle, etc.

If you look at old collections you don’t see these features much; or at least, it’s nothing like Scottish music, where you could have a whole book chock full of the fiddle tunes in A; and even the D and G tunes wander around in the bass, or have those interval leaps that are feasible on the fiddle but don’t go on the Irish pipes. An example of that which we still play is the reel the Pure Drop/Hand Me Down the Tackle, where we go from middle D to the bottom D for the cran. This is straightforward on the chanter. The reel the Mason’s Apron starts the same way, note how in the fiddle setting it’s not only in A major but starts at high A, leaps to middle A, and they play a treble - just like the Drop, but unfeasible on the chanter. In G it’s merely tricky. The bulk of old Irish tunes avoid difficult movements like this, note. Scottish tunes are full of them, in any key too.

O’Neill’s has a lot of tunes with low C#s, even in tunes from flautists and pipers, who obviously couldn’t play them. They are code for crans or some similar ornament on the bottom D for the flute. Their inclusion was probably due to the transcriber, James O’Neill, being a fiddler with some classical training. These are somewhat rare in old Irish collections, but Scottish books run rampant with that note and low C natural. These are just a pair of examples of what makes the Irish music in these old books distinctively Irish, and indicative of the predominance of pipes and flutes.

Indeed pipes weren’t anything as common by the end of the 19th C, but it seems to me that the core repertoire had already been composed by that stage. Rambling Pitchfork, Green Groves of Erin, Rakish Paddy, Donnybrook Jig, Butcher’s March, My Love is in America. That kind of thing. All of those in print earlier, and all suitable for the pipes. Maybe there was a lull in composing at that stage?

Yeah, the session I play at’s actually not the noisiest venue in town, except during big football matches. And I could play the fiddle, but there’s already 4 of the things there already. This is in a town next door to Portland, Oregon, note that Burke and O’Dohmnaill even named one of their LPs after that burg. Because of Burke’s influence the fiddle seems to be the default instrument to learn, with everything that entails. Or so it seems to me, anyway.

More later, have to run, just noticed Nico and Cathy’s posts.

10

I think people find what they’re looking for. I’ve looked in many old books, and there are quite a lot of old tunes that resemble what you might call modern irish tunes. O’Neill’s included. The tunes aren’t just ones that are suitable for pipes, but for fiddle, too. I don’t really think the collections indicate a predominance of pipes and flutes at all. I think O’Neill focused more on pipers than fiddlers in his non-music books, because they were fairly rare, and pretty much always have been. The tune collections seem to be evenly split, or possibly leaning more towards fiddlers. Unless you unfairly lump flute and pipes into one category… then it’s hard to say. And anyway a lot of the time F. O’Neill didn’t remember where he’d gotten a tune, so it could have been from a fiddler just as easily.

As common as what or when? And I don’t think you can say that the core repertoire had already been composed unless you start citing those things, and eliminating more recent tunes from your definition of “core”. What does that mean, anyway? It’s an argument I’ve seen before, but it doesn’t really seem like there is an agreed upon “core” repertoire by any definition anywhere within Irish music, nor has there really ever been.

There are just way more fiddles everywhere, I think. You have violin stores all over the country (and world). Name one pipe store anywhere…

For what it’s worth, I think the term “modern irish music” can’t really be defined, at least regarding tunes. Most people use it, I think, to mean “tunes I don’t like” or “tunes that aren’t suitable for my instrument”. I think there’s a stylistic definition, and there are some tunes that seem to suit that style better than others, though. Also, I think that Reavy’s tunes could be called modern, but that’s because in art and literature, the label modern usually applies to things from 1900 to about 1950… I think Reavy tunes (and Fahey, Kelly, O’Brien, etc etc) tunes are well absorbed in the tradition, being generally accepted as part of the repertoire of Galway and East Clare styles (as an example). Many of these tunes anyway, not necessarily all of them.

11

Aha! I’ve solved it. If all your session peeps would just take a cue from Kevin Burke and play fiddle as wonderfully with the pipes as Burke does … :party:

12

Kevin,

What you need to do is have Mark play whistle, Nancy the Box and Debbie the mandolin, that will cut down on the fiddles. :slight_smile: I do think it’s more of Dan’s influence for all the fiddle tunes, he teaches in his session classes.

13

Not a fiddle tune but, strangely enough, a harmonium tune. And not junk nonsense per se when you can’t blame the brilliant Simon Jeffes (who wrote it for quite different purposes) for its subsequent, frequently messed up, adoption as a ‘trad’ standard!

14

Music For a Found Harmonium’s a fun tune and a nice party piece, but emulating Patrick Street by playing just seems too slavish for me. Can’t you guys find something novel on your one to play to fill that gap? For the pipes I used to go into stuff like Walk, Don’t Run…use your imagination!

Didn’t know Debbie was a mandoist. I play the box a bit as well, very over-enthusiastically. “With power comes responsibility.” :laughing: Are you an attendee at Dan’s classes on Saturday, Tom? I heard about Bruce the piper being kicked out of the Co Cork by Dan’s students. “Too loud.” :laughing: He and I could swap axes, I guess…Bruce is quite the bard.

I run into the fiddle tune dilemma all over town so I wouldn’t chalk that entirely up to Dan. There’s Channing and Preston who play fiddle tunes on the pipes just fine too. As I said dunno if Portland is more heavily weighted towards that sort of tune than elsewhere.

“Core repertoire” a century ago would be the tunes people were recording. Here’s the titles A-F of sides Michael Coleman laid down, for instance:

Apples in Winter
The Banks
Bonnie Kate, Jennie’s Chickens
The Boys of the Lough
Casey’s
Cherish the Ladies
The Crooked Road to Dublin
Crowley’s
The Derry Hornpipe
Doctor Gilbert, The Queen of May
Dougherty’s Jigs
Farewell to Ireland
Farrell O’Gara
The Foxhunter
The Frieze Britches
The Frost is All Over

The Banks is an Eb/Bb hornpipe medley, and some of those are fiddle tunes, as I define them anyway - Farrel O’Gara and the 2nd Crowley’s tune, Jenny’s Chickens. Some of them he plays with variations or ornaments suitable primarily for the fiddle - Bonnie Kate for instance, but even those are optional. Touhey , Rowsome, Ennis and Billy Andrews recorded Bonnie Kate without all that rot. About everything else is very much chanter ready, and these sorts of tunes are very typical of the 78 RPM era. Of course there was no end of musicians who didn’t go into studios but even there, outside of Donegal, you weren’t confronted with so many pipes-hostile sorts of tunes, I’d say.

I play the Banks medley in G on the pipes, myself. Also Farrell O’Gara in G - keeps the high d’‘’ key from getting rusty. :smiley: I’ve a recording of the old piper Tom Busby playing that tune in D, too. In the 2nd part where the fiddles go f~d3 he’d backstitch the back D or playing it tight three times. So my class of “fiddle tune” wasn’t wholly unknown to him, and presumably his teachers, too. But most of what Tom recorded was piping tunes, the sort of the stuff I listed before.

My impression of what’s in O’Neill’s differs from Nico’s all the way. I don’t know if anyone - Paul de Grae or Caoimhin Mac Aoidh, perhaps - has systematically examined the book to see how much is strictly fiddle-ly. There are some notable cases where a piper is the source for what you’d think had to be a fiddle setting - O’Neill’s piping brother-in-law Barney Delaney is the source for one setting of the reel Follow Me Down to Carlow, where you have a high g followed by a roll/treble on C nat, which takes skill to do on the chanter. But on one of the surviving recordings of Delaney you hear a roll on C# in every go at the 2nd part so he was the man for the job. But then he was perhaps the greatest piper of his time, too…

I skimmed just now through “The Scribe,” Mac Aoidh’s biography of James O’Neill; while he does cover the bias in sources and the instruments they played (no free reeds or plectrum string instruments), he doesn’t go into the suitability of settings. Swear I read something of the like once, though, something de Grae posted on IRTRAD-L back when perhaps.

15

Sure, that’s one definition. Is it the right one or the only one? And is a century ago when Michael Coleman actually started recording? What sort of tunes were played at the Irish Music Club in Chicago just a scant few more years than exactly a century ago? And what about all the tunes that Coleman et al recorded at the behest of the record companies, the ballroom dances and polkas and the like, that weren’t really their core repertoire (and that they wouldn’t have chosen to record), but that became part of the repertoire after their release in Ireland? Besides, don’t we just have individual player’s repertoires? Is that really a core repertoire of the tradition?

Seems like it’s not a very good definition, to me.

Probably not - musicians play what they know, what they like, and what they can - if you have lots of fiddlers and box players in an area, there’s a good chance they’ll play tunes that work on those instruments (and may not work on the chanter).

Well yeah, I was disagreeing with you :wink:. It figures I’d be disagreeing with something that differs from my view :smiley:.

Take a look only at the tunes that have a listed source (Is DMI better than MoI for this?) and count how many are pipers, fiddlers or fluters. Discount all from James O’Neill and Francis O’Neill to start, or else count them separately. That’ll give you a clear idea of whether fiddlers outnumbered pipers or vice versa, which answers whether pipes and flutes actually have a predominance as you said.

But, I think you’re actually meaning that tunes suitable for the pipes have a predominance, which is another issue altogether. It’s a bit harder to tell, but if you go through and first mark off all the ones that are in keys other than D or G (and the related modes), and then go through those and add back in the ones that might have been given the wrong key signature or still work fine on the chanter (C tunes with no Fs, A tunes with no G#s, etc), and then go through all the D/G ones and eliminate all the ones with jumps or passages or whatever that don’t work on the chanter, which could easily be a subjective call, as you noticed with Bernard Delaney, then you might have some idea. But there are a lot of subjective calls, so how good is the result?

And then after all that, you still have to ask the question, does a tune being suitable for the pipes mean it was intended for the pipes or that the presence or pipes or pipers caused it to be suitable for them? Which leads to: Is playing in D and G easier on the fiddle than other keys? And: Is there some other reason those might have been preferred by fiddlers than that they played with pipers?



Anyway, I’ve been reading O’Neill’s IMM and A Fascinating Hobby, so that’s probably part of why I have a different view than you on the quantity of, and quantity of tunes from each of, fiddlers and pipers. He writes about where he gets tunes from, and it seems like it’s relatively evenly spread between fiddlers and pipers, less from fluters, and a large chunk from his memory where he can’t recall. He also talks about the fiddlers and pipers present, and it does seem like there’s a lot more than a small number of pipers (how’s that for a phrase :boggle: ), more maybe than there were 30 years later.

16

I heard it was the bartender that thought it was too loud, the others liked having him, and were greatly disappointed when he got up and left. Yes, I’m in Dan’s session class on Mondays, and play with Mark, Nancy, and Debbie every few weeks.

I just got a Pastoral pipes, it is a little louder than Channing’s pipes. I’ve only taken it to one class and it dominated the room. “With power comes responsibility.” boy that’s the truth!

17

Maybe in America.

18

Now, what do bartenders know about music! :smiling_imp: But that is a powerful sound he gets out of those Gallagher pipes. Sat down with Bruce between me and Keith the piano accordion player and had to ask Keith if he was actually playing when we were done… :boggle:

I just got a Pastoral pipes, it is a little louder than Channing’s pipes. I’ve only taken it to one class and it dominated the room. “With power comes responsibility.” boy that’s the truth!

That can’t be a Brad Angus set, I imagine, unless you’ve jacked the reeds through the ceiling. He’s up in Vancouver if you don’t know. Vancouver WA. Vantucky. :laughing: He can turn you out a set of Pastorals that won’t cause tinnitus. Or calm yours down.

19

They weren’t doing so hot in Ireland either, despite your having Clancy/Ennis/Rowsome/Reck/Doran around. Mind, one reason to start up NPU was because they were worried the instrument was in danger of becoming extinct.

20

True, we don’t know when Coleman learned those tunes in most instances, and Crowley’s Reels he supposedly composed himself. Excise all the barn dances if you like, although he called one of those after Gannon, one of his elders back home. And all the polkas, and the one set of waltzes. That’s all the “non-trad” stuff, although the reference to the companies imposing their will on these musicians I think would be more specific to stuff James Morrison’s band recorded, things like the set with Oh Dem Golden Slippers in it. One-steps I think. Throw all that out and you still have heaps of tunes that were recorded by most everyone back then, which was more my point. Black Rogue, Saddle the Pony, Stack of Barley, Liverpool Hornpipe. These were recorded not just by these fiddlers and their ensembles but all sorts of soloists and duo/trios. You’ll have to perhaps take my word for it here, unless you’re a devotee of that stuff. Again, I haven’t systematically noted which tunes made it onto disc or cylinder.

Another line of evidence in my favor here was O’Neill’s remark about how in many places in Ireland the music was kept alive by just a few handfuls of tunes, almost always the same ones - Miss McLeod, Harvest Home, Connaughtman’s Rambles.

[quote=“Kevin L. Rietmann”]
My impression of what’s in O’Neill’s differs from Nico’s all the way.
[/quote]

Well yeah, I was disagreeing with you > :wink:> . It figures I’d be disagreeing with something that differs from my view > :smiley:> .

Take a look only at the tunes that have a listed source (Is DMI better than MoI for this?) and count how many are pipers, fiddlers or fluters. Discount all from James O’Neill and Francis O’Neill to start, or else count them separately. That’ll give you a clear idea of whether fiddlers outnumbered pipers or vice versa, which answers whether pipes and flutes actually have a predominance as you said.

Not necessarily the musician, but the type of tune. Plenty of what was collected from fiddlers was suitable for wind instruments, you know. If O’Neill were working in Glasgow you’d get a different result, to put it mildly, and not just in all the Scotch Snaps. That’s the basis of what I’m getting at here.

But, I think you’re actually meaning that tunes suitable for the pipes have a predominance, which is another issue altogether. It’s a bit harder to tell, but if you go through and first mark off all the ones that are in keys other than D or G (and the related modes), and then go through those and add back in the ones that might have been given the wrong key signature or still work fine on the chanter (C tunes with no Fs, A tunes with no G#s, etc), and then go through all the D/G ones and eliminate all the ones with jumps or passages or whatever that don’t work on the chanter, which could easily be a subjective call, as you noticed with Bernard Delaney, then you might have some idea. But there are a lot of subjective calls, so how good is the result?

You’d have to agree on some ground rules; or state which ones you’re imposing on your results. There are big exceptions to how much you can trust what’s in the big book, too. Have you heard the cylinder recording of Touhey playing Gusty’s Frolics? There are two takes, a 4 part one and another where he plays all the parts printed in O’Neill’s. To look at that printed version you might wonder how a piper could navigate through all that stuff. Touhey’s solution for the first bar’s low A notes is to do the logical thing, namely just throw them in the trash where they belong and play crans. :party:

And then after all that, you still have to ask the question, does a tune being suitable for the pipes mean it was intended for the pipes or that the presence or pipes or pipers caused it to be suitable for them? Which leads to: Is playing in D and G easier on the fiddle than other keys? And: Is there some other reason those might have been preferred by fiddlers than that they played with pipers?

G is simple enough on the fiddle with a bit of practice; but A is much more forgiving, the fingering is a lot more straightforward. There’s a reason it’s such a popular key in Scotland and the US, and it isn’t just the bagpipe tradition in the former’s case. There are scads of Scottish tunes in A that go far beyond a bare octave + one tone range.

Anyway, I’ve been reading O’Neill’s IMM and A Fascinating Hobby, so that’s probably part of why I have a different view than you on the quantity of, and quantity of tunes from each of, fiddlers and pipers. He writes about where he gets tunes from, and it seems like it’s relatively evenly spread between fiddlers and pipers, less from fluters, and a large chunk from his memory where he can’t recall. He also talks about the fiddlers and pipers present, and it does seem like there’s a lot more than a small number of pipers (how’s that for a phrase > :boggle: > ), more maybe than there were 30 years later.

Looking at the picture of the Chicago Irish Music Club I count 11 pipers, 8 fiddlers, 7 flauters. As Mac Aoidh points out, you could’ve likely achieved the same or more musicianers with all the box/'tina/mando/banjo players they wouldn’t let on the premises. :stuck_out_tongue: 30 years later it was down to Eddie Mullaney and Joe Shannon, and one other guy I think? Lean times to say the least.