Over Christmas I decided to try to learn this tune and I have the basics down but I have some questions. Is there a standard tempo for hornpipes? They seem slower than reels. Is there a standard rhythm for hornpipes? For jigs I shoot for “Jiggity jiggity” or “Jiggity jiggity jiggity” for slip jigs and try to develop my breathing etc. to support that. With the Rights of Man I find that in the second part (the higher one) I slip into a rhythm of Tada Tada Tada and this does not seem right.
Does any of this make sense? If so could you give me some pointers on which notes to combine in one breath and which to separate?
Hornpipes are typically slower than reels. They should bounce and swagger rather than rush. A good rythmic mnemonic for hornpipes is “upsy-daisy, upsy-daisy.”
You’ll hear hornpipes played either smoothly or syncopated. How you play one depends on your tastes for it, or on how it’s being played in a group setting. There are hornpipes I prefer to play smoothly, but at a session this has to go out the window if I’m to fit in, and vice-versa. The main thing is to stick to one way or the other for the duration of the tune. I personally wouldn’t combine smooth and syncopated hornpipes in a set, either. Just doesn’t work for me.
Hope this helps some.
Hey, “Upsy-daisy”. Good one, Redwolf. You can say that either smoothly or syncopated, but it’s still got that hornpipe feel.
But is it the right answer? In reality hornpipes come in many different shades of rhythms, maybe ‘there’s not one single correct rhythm but there are many wrong ones’ is the longer and better reply.
I must say again the jiggety jiggety and whooppsa daisy approach to rhythm will lead you down a path to heartless formulaic playing. Not a good idea.
Dotted rhythm. And as Peter points out, there are shades of that. Jigs can be played with degrees of syncopation, and so can reels, polkas, etc. Whether they ought to be is another matter. Dotted rhythm tends to be hard-associated with hornpipes for some reason (in the US, anyway), and yet if you have some good CDs to listen to, I’ll bet that a good number of any hornpipes aren’t really played that way, although there might be something of a “hitch” to the rhythm. And: some might be well-syncopated, too. It depends.
As to mnemonics (“jiggety-jiggety” or “upsy-daisy”) to help a beginner get the idea of a basic rhythmic pattern, one has to start somewhere, just so long as it’s not blindly clutched with a death grip. That way indeed makes for wooden, formulaic playing. Listening is paramount, of course. That is non-negotiable.
Like Nano said, there are a lot of folks here (I’d say the majority of them) that claim the proper way to write a hormpipe is with dotted 8th notes. I never have liked it. Although it may be one of the closest ways to fit it to sheet music I still don’t think it’s quite there. Some jazz musicians that I’ve known have made comments that it sounds more like swung 8th notes. I thought that explanation suited it a little bit better.
What it comes down to, though, is that you do need to just listen and know yourself what a hornpipe should sound like. The local academy of Irish studies here in AZ was working on a tunebook and wanted to write all of the hornpipes out with the dotted eighths but I had them take it out. Instead, I recommended that they just put it in simple notation and provide a CD supplement for the students to hear what it sounds like.
I think you mean “swing”, not “syncopation”. Syncopation is when you tie an off-beat note across the next beat, or at least emphasize an off-beat. It doesn’t have anything to do with dotted rhythms or (normally, anyway) hornpipes.
I hear syncopation occasionally in reels and polkas, where say, the rhythm players (guitarist/bodhran) will play the chord/thud on beats 2 and 4 of a reel. A good example is this one by Nomos; click on the 5th tune, “Big John’s”:
Tapping your foot to the tune probably won’t be in phase with the guitar accompaniment. Fiddlers and squeezebox players will accent on the weak beats, even in the middle of a 1/4 note.
The reason I brought it up was because I don’t think I’ve ever noticed syncopation in jigs or hornpipes, but I suppose it’s possible.
Thanks, guys. Hereafter I will not use “syncopation” in reference to dotted notes. What the heck is the classical term for that sort of rhythm, anyway?
The degree of “swing” is largely dictated by tempo. That is, it get’s awfully difficult to swing at faster tempos because the weak beats get very short in duration. That in itself forces variation whether the players are cognizant of it or not.
While I understand where you’re coming from, I don’t quite agree with that in this context. The point I am trying to put forward is that not only the treatment can vary from one tune to the next but also that within the one tune the rhythm within the phrases can vary, it’s certainly not as rigid as a dotted notation would suggest. I also don’t think that a good player playing at a higher speed will straighten a hornpipe to suit the speed.
Pat Mitchell has a specific use for the term syncopation as a means of rhythmic variation in Irish music. He talks about it in his Rhythm and Structure articles in the SRS journal (specifically the second article).
I don’t know about classical, but the ethnomusicologist might refer to it as “Aksak”, Turkish for “limping”. That Balkan upbringing is coming in handy after all - funeral thread, rhythms. Next someone willl ask about Bulgarian folk-dancing
He heavily accents the third note of each triplet by playing it louder than the other two. The first note, as you would expect, is still longer in duration…very cool effect.
(Tunes are Sliabh Russel/Peter Barnes/Indian Summer)
and try to develop my breathing etc. to support that. With the Rights of Man I find that in the second part (the higher one) I slip into a rhythm of Tada Tada Tada and this does not seem right.
