Piping for Irish Step Dancing

Uilleann Pipes
1

Sometimes at gigs I’ve been asked to play (uilleann pipes) for Irish Step Dancers. I just end up playing a couple of reels or jigs and match their tempo. Are there common tunes that dancers would prefer or recognize? In the highland piping world, the tunes for dancing are well defined especially for highland dance competition, with some dances having a defined set tune, and others allowing for just a general type of tune, but having a very narrow selection of actual pieces that are appropriate that the dancers expect to be able to recognize. Examples would be the sword dance – a good highland dance piper would always play the Ghillie Callum, and for the Seann Truibhas - “Whistle Over the Love of It”.

Also, are there a set number of parts for different dances? From what I’ve seen, it seems that Irish Step is a lot more impromptu, with the number and type of steps being decided on the fly.

I’ve seen some uilleann piping tunes described as a “set dance” (like The Three Sea Captains). Are these Set Dances routines that your well-taught Irish dancer would know?

Thanks!
Jeff

2

My experience is very limited, to SoCal and occasional step dancing around here. But since that’s where you are … :wink:

Yes, there are some tune-dance combinations dancers might expect. Set dances like Three Sea Captains, The Blackbird, The Downfall of Paris. Treble jigs like Tobin’s Favorite, Tongs By The Fire, St. Patrick’s Day in the Morning. And “The Three Tunes” - Haste to the Wedding, Astley’s Ride, The German Beau.

Otherwise, they’re usually fine with tunes of your choice that match the dance type and tempo they need (as you said). You also need to know if they expect an extra A part as an intro. And if they’re going to end the tune on an A part, and if you should keep playing through the end.

Here’s a handy ABC file of some set dances that come up: http://www.ece.wisc.edu/~cobb/irish/Setdance.abc

Also check out the tunes and sets on David Lindquist’s accordion album, “Step This Way”: https://thesession.org/recordings/1139

David’s been accompanying step dancers around here for years. And I think he’s in Santa Monica nowadays if you want to talk to him.

3

All the dancers I played for expected that, and I must confess that it’s a bit difficult at first since you are generally so accustomed to playing the A part twice and not thrice ! Need some concentration to do it properly and not follow with the B part straight away ! Which puts the dancers in a panic :stuck_out_tongue:

4

By all means you’ll need to include “The Sticky Note.”
First tune of this set.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WURqzxpmbj0&feature=youtube_gdata_player

5

These days a lot of dancers of course practice to recordings, the downside being that they’ll sometimes practice certain dances to the same tune over and over. Since most aren’t trad musicians, they can be thrown when confronted with unfamiliar tunes (and one can blame the instructor for that). There was the time at a feis I was to play a slip jig and started in on O’Farrell’s Welcome Into Limerick, and the dancers were completely lost and rudderless - turned out that they only practiced slip jigs to a recording of The Butterfly, otherwise they didn’t know a 9/8 from a turnip. :really:

6

Sort of interesting, maybe, people dancing a step here rarely expect anything but a reel, usually Miss McLeod or New Mown Meadow (the Old silver Spear, or very occasionally a hornpipe.

7

Peter, do you mean the sort of spontaneous thing when someone gets up and takes a few steps? (That happens here, too.) Or the more formal feis / dance academy performance thing? Or both?

Hmm, don’t think I’ve ever heard that tune around here, and not for The High Cauled Cap.

8

Or the more formal feis / dance academy performance thing?

That’s really a sort of a hidden world to me and we don’t get any of that mostly. I meant dancers asked to do ‘a few steps’ on the night.

9

Right. Personally, I find the little girls with their dresses and wigs and heavy makeup rather terrifying on several levels. :laughing:

10

And the pushy mammies that come with them!

Seriously though, we get local people like Aidan Vaughan, that would be pretty typical.

Set dances would be rare enough (not the sets, they are going all the time), we’d get Michael Tubridy and his dancers doing Dan Furey stuff like ‘The Priest and his Boots’.

11

Yes, that’s one of the “levels”. :wink:

12

I’ve heard The Sticky Note maybe once or twice, but it’s definitely not session currency here, either, and that’s probably because it’s a pretty tedious tune. The box supports it well enough, though. And of course it’s fine for dancers. But when The High-Cauled Cap is danced, then unless otherwise requested I play The High-Cauled Cap, dammit. If it starts getting boring, I just add some polkas.

13

Calling it tedious is generous and the box that supports it usually has piano keys.
Speaking of pushy mammies then theres the pushy little trained
chimps dancing. A friend of mine who grew up in new york city in the late 40’s
said that she step danced at every feis imaginable until they found out
she could play the fiddle and was immediately press ganged into doing so.
Whenever a dancer moved their hand to indicate their chosen tempo
all bets were off. Tempos went up or down with nothing to do with the command.

14

I once played for the Governor at the State House for St. Patrick’s Day, and there was a local school of step dancers doing their thing. I offered to play for them but they seemed not to understand what I was suggesting. When their turn came, their director got up and said (and I kid you not) The girls will now dance a set for you and this one is called Fast Reel.

15

The divide between music and dance is disheartening , two years ago at an Irish hosted house party here in California we had the areas best musicians, but the step dance teacher used a boom box. three weeks ago, same party, location and mostly same musicians the ceili dancers had no problem with us, they would hear something they liked and start dancing, we kept at it until they were done. One fellow apparently had experience with some of the dancers and knew their hand signal, or maybe the dance they were doing and we finished right with the dance. Let me tell you what a joy playing for that level of dance is.

Later in the evening a solo step dancer came out wanting to dance for us. No boom box present, she tried to tell us she wanted a treble jig, maybe some other dance, don’t recall. None of the native born Irish musicians had a clue what she was asking for and just started out on a regular session paced tune. She stopped and asked for slower, but the lead musicians just couldn’t get it slow enough. I pulled out my rather loud concertina, and with the help of a fiddler friend who is also a dancer, took the lead. Our dancer was able to do her thing.

If you are going to play for the solo, competitive step dance you need a new vocabulary. I won’t try to define the words here, I suspect there are regional differences, but the vocabulary identifies both time signature and tempo. The school I used to play for essentially had two speeds. Jigs, reel or hornpipes were played at either 120 or 69. You have to be rock solid at the chosen tempo, no speedy uppy slowly downy.

You must be able to clearly define the beat, most are not musicians or have any interest in the music they dance to, and the crap they get from the recordings is very heavy with the bass from either the piano accordion, bass or piano. Really, I can tell you stories about how they hear what they dance too, and its not melody

Prepare three or four tunes that you can hold steady at the higher tempo. The teacher I played for said the hired feish musicians played the same tune, same tempo hours on end until all the girls from all the schools get through the program. Must be torture for the band. Don’t forget the tune must have a strong, easy to define beat.

For fun now, set up your metronome to 69 and play Kesh. Not a bit of music there, hrd to play, harder to dance to. Now try Off She Goes or Tripping Up The Stairs. Why so slow? Mostly it is so the dancers can do a whole lot of fancy footwork. Think three taps per note and you will get the idea.

You will need to select a hornpipe or two that sounds good at the same slow tempo. The dancers seem to like Boys of Bluehill around here, but same as the jigs, some don’t sound good that slow.

Do the same with reels. If you try to play any of these slow tunes at session, even the slow players will find it too slow. And yes, you will usually play the first time three time through to set the tempo.

In my limited experience the set dance for this dancing is very different from set dance in the group or ceili format. Blackbird, Garden of Daisy’s, Three Sea Captains are this kind of set dance the dance and the tune are inseparable. There are a few ceili dances like that but mostly the phrase used is “dancing the sets” would be a bit more clear. The one or two set dances I play are at that slower tempo, if you happen to have one in your tune list, get the metronome out and practice at the slower speed.

This is what I dealt with fifteen or so years ago but my fiddler friend tell me now some of that is inaccurate, some of the slower dances have been sped up. Slip jigs can now, at least at her school where the teacher is ex River Dance, be danced to near session speed.

I currently play for a group of ceili dancers. They basically jog from position to position with no footwork. Real ceili is a joy to be a participant in, but the way my group dances and some groups back in SF you have to play so fast all the beauty of the music is gone. We just decided that what they will get when they ask for a reel is a polka. We came to this conclusion after they pulled at a CD saying this is a set dance, we have to dance to this tune. The parent group in SF had taken a track off a commercial CD and sped it up. My friend counted it at 138 and then figured it was about a step and a half sharp. So polkas work just fine. I can’t and don’t want to play reels that fast.

I can just about play pipes for this group and will probably start some time this year, but I just can’t imagine the typical solo,step dancer I have experience with being able to and here in Sacramento valley I have no opportunities anyway.

I think it is sad the divide between the music and the dance. YMMV, as usual.

Mike

16

Agreed Mike,

having moved from Co.Clare to the centre of France some years ago I am pleased to report that Musicians and Dancers are virtually inseperable here in the local traditional musics that is.

Shortly after we moved here, and did not know anybody, we somehow heard that there was to be a musical evening in the local town, an Open Mic affair… bring your instrument and make some music. Sounded like a good chance to meet like minded souls. There was quite a crowd of people, plenty of singer guitarists … but after a few songs the guy organising looked at us with the invite to break out the tools. We played a couple of hornpipes with the fiddle and Pipes, when into the second tune I looked up to gauge any reaction and noticed a lot of couples dancing . I did not know what they were dancing and I certainly had never experienced such a spontaneous reaction in all the years we lived in Ireland. I gave my wife a nudge to ‘keep going’ as we enjoyed watching these dancers circulating.

It turns out they were dancing a Schottiche ( or Scottish as they call it here) which was the closest dance they could fit to our hornpipes.

We met plenty of musicians that night and have now absorbed ourselves in ’ musique de centre France’ and play regularly for the Bals Trad… as much because it feels RIGHT to play live music for live dancers as because there is little ITM action around here.

In this French music scene there is sometimes a ‘session’, usually late at night after a Bal, but generally the music is played for dancing and dancing is very popular here.

17

Hello friends,
at first I miss greetings to the forum. Is that no longer state of the art? Anyway, I played a lot for dancers, solo dancers and others. Jeff’s question at the beginning was as I understood about step dances and he mentioned the Three Sea Captains - a Set Dance. I have to mention that set dances as the three sea captains are dedicated to certain steps as a composition. Other set dances too have a special number of bars and also dedicated step settings. It is not possible to interchange music to sets. But for jigs, reels and others you can play what you want. As anywhere else these are better and worse choices. Tunes for example with a quarter note at the beginning played short as the G at the beginning of Miss McLeods are better than quavers running along.

18

When I played GHB for dancers in times past, I learned to play the A part 3 times as a matter of course. At a local ITM session we often play for set dances, reels, solo dances and so on. Most session players need to be told of the 3 A parts at the beginning. Reels are often played at a faster tempo for dancing than they are played in sessions. A hornpipe for a dancer is played at a much slower tempo than played in sessions. As noted, set dances each have their own tunes.

When I took up GHB, my instructor insisted all his pupils took Scottish dance lessons at the same time we were learning on the practice chanter. I found this to be helpful as we knew in our bodies the tempos required to play for dancers. When I tired of GHB competitions, I took to playing GHB for Scottish competition dancers and played a 3/4 GHB for Scottish country dances. This instilled an internal metronome in my muscle memory and am sensitive to when I am playing too slow or to fast for a dancer. I know a lot of players who lack rhythm in their playing. I would suggest they take up dancing so the rhythm and lift become built into their playing. It instills a sense of rhythm in muscle memory and is very helpful for those who lack an innate sense of rhythm.

19

Christian nailed it.

As a musician playing with an (competitive) Irish Stepdancer, your role is to: support the dancer.

You have to remember that, at least at the higher levels of Preliminary and Open Championship in modern competitive Irish Stepdance, the dancers are performing highly choreographed and rehearsed dances, and not just improvising. They expect a tune to be played in a certain form, at a certain tempo, and if it is not played just so, it really throws them off.

For whatever reason, Irish Stepdancers have developed their own ‘similar but different’ lingo and forms, which may seem a bit odd to a person accustomed to playing in a traditional Irish music session. We can laugh at that, but in way doing so is similar to a person on first exposure to a traditional Irish music session saying that all the music sounds the same. In reality there is a lot going on!

The modern stepdancers are not particularly well schooled in musical theory or nomenclature, and even some instructors struggle with explaining concepts that session musicians would be comfortable with. But the dancers sure do feel and express the rhythm.

It’s an education to attend an Oireachtas, National, or World championship competition and watch the musicians. Almost all play with metronomes in their ear and their timing is near perfect. In a high-level competition, the dancer will request the dance, by name, and at a certain tempo. It’s up to the musician to match that request. The best competition musicians are able to do that, and seem to get a lot of call-back work, and get paid pretty well. You see less capable musicians at the local Feis’, and they can really cause problems for the dancers because they don’t understand the needs and expectations of the dancers.

There is definitely a repertoire of tunes a competition stepdance musician knows. Not just any tune will do. Set dances especially, Blackbird and King or the Fairies are good examples, and have very specific steps (the set). Certain jigs and reels are popular and you can hear these at a Feis, or on the many recorded tune collection that the dancers use to practice with. You can get these at Feis’ and are a good education for aspiring stepdance musicians.

Really, it is a competitive, but artistic sport, and does not share a lot with Cèilidh or Sean Nós dancing. It is about as foreign a concept to most on first exposure, as your first Session was. Learning to play with stepdancers certainly ups your game as a musician.

20

I’ve played for step dancers for a long time down at The Field pub here in San Diego. It’s a real challenge, you have to nail the tempos exactly. Luckily, the lead guy in our band played played piano accordion for feiseanna for a good part of his life and that makes it easier, all I have to do is match him note for note and make him right. There have been a few times when he has been out of town and I had to be the lead player and set all the tempos. Now that was a very different sort of experience.

Funny story, several years ago did a St. Patrick’s Day gig at VFW hall in El Centro, which is in the middle of the desert. They had also brought in a step dancer, and she brought a boombox. We told her we would be happy to play live music for her, ask what was she planning on doing?

She takes the CD out of the boombox, looks at it, and asks us “Do you know ‘The Reel’ or ‘The Hornpipe’ ?”

Pretty funny moment.

Michael