On 2002-01-27 14:33, rpmseattle wrote:
In my experience, the really good Irish musicians who understand the folk roots of the tradition are playing the C natural in a place that is slightly sharp relative to what you might think of in western rhythm and blues, or in a film score (like Titanic) for instance. (There is some scientific basis for this - a “high” 7th scale degree is more closely related to the natural overtone series).
This high C-nat is very noticeable in the playing of Cape Breton fiddlers. Scottish fiddler Alisdair Fraser has wittily dubbed it the “C supernatural”!
The fact that the fiddle allows the player to pitch a note exactly where he or she wants to is just one of many reasons why many people, me among them, consider it the king of instruments. Many older-generation fiddle players used natural thirds and sevenths that gave their music a unique spine-tingling tonal quality that other instruments can never match.
But to get back to C-nat: it is an especially important note in Irish music as the “vinegar note” in the D mixolydian scale, exploited to such great effect by uilleann pipers. Whereas C-nat tends to be a very weak note on the whistle, on the pipes it is strong, and a piper friend once showed me all the variant fingerings that pipers such as Séamus Ennis would use to sound the note, with different tonal qualities and gradations of pitch to suit their purposes in a given tune or passage in a tune.
But all these subtleties and possibilities for being out of tune that you mention: in your average session, there is often little room for such niceties. If people could be in perfectly in tune on other notes, there might be reason to worry about the exact pitch of your C-nat!
But when you’re playing in duets or small ensembles, these considerations are worth paying attention to.
At one period I played fiddle regularly with a very expressive uillean piper, and I learned to adjust my intonation to match the pipes in various places (sharpening my low E, shifting the C-nat to bring into tune with whatever he was doing on a long note, for example).
As a whistler playing with a fiddler, I would try to adjust my C-nats, “neutral” Fs and so on, to him or her (if I like what he or she was doing).
Of course when you play with fixed-pitch instruments such as accordians, you haven’t much choice but to fit in.
But solo, you can do what you like best.
So how subtle you can get about these matters, I think, depends entirely on the context you are playing in.
I must say that tuning has become a bugbear for me ever since I switched to whistle from fiddle (because of an injury). Playing fiddle, I could always adjust to whatever was going on. But when I just cannot get my whistle in tune with another whistler or flute player in a session, I often have to stop playing. There may be such a thing as “nicely out of tune” but there’s nastily too!
