Should bear out what everyone has been saying about great lift being possible with minimal ornamentation. The next one to come, a reel (give me a few days) is even more of a treat.
Edited to add this unauthorized quote from an email from Peter (forgive the liberty Peter) which I thought would add context to his commentary on the page.
I would appreciate comments on the commentary, I don’t think I managed to get across what I wanted to get across i.e. that this sort of performance may look very plain on paper but is in fact a lovely subtle piece of music. It’s the same thing you get when listening to some of Micho Russell’s of Tommy Reck’s music, you hear it and think it’s wonderful but when you try to analyse it and write it down you find it looks like a pedestrian uninteresting performance and you realise all the magic is in between the notes, in the bounce, in these indescribable things, the personality of the player or whatever. It’s magic but how to convey it to the reader I don’t know. Whatever it is, it is really the stuff you can only learn by osmosis, by endless listening and absorbing whatever you can grasp.
[ This Message was edited by: StevieJ on 2002-08-16 22:51 ]
I’m a bit curious about the comments on this version having minimal ornamentation. Given that the tune doesn’t really have much in the way of good spots for rolls, this is pretty much exactly the sort of ornamentation I’d expect. (I might have added graces to separate the doubled notes in the A part, but then, I would never think of using a double-grace at the start of measure 4.)
So let me turn the question around, if I might – where else in the tune would one add (tasteful) ornaments?
I played the tune and the ornamentation fell where it felt right for me. I wanted to grace the first note in each three-note group, short roll on the F’s in bar 9, 10, 13 & 14, and do crans in bars 8 and 16.
Excellent, Peter. I love the simplicity of Joe’s ornamentation which lets the tune come through. I’ve heard too many ‘Irish’ over-ornamented offerings where its difficult to know which tune’s being played.
And now I know to start at no. 1 when I get to O’Niell’s! (I’m still on Kerr’s)
I wonder how the separation between repeated
D’s (in bar 1, 2 etc) and E’s (bar 3) is achieved. The obvious way to do it is by cuts, but I can’t hear any. Could it be very soft tonguing? Or just a surge of breath? Or an extremely quick, quasi-inaudible cut?
It seems to me that this “soft articulation” plays an important role in the phrasing. If the separation were too sharp, the “4 note blocks” described by Peter would be ruined.