Fiddle Studio: How hard is it to learn the fiddle? (Na Ceannabháin Bhána)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Na Ceannabháin Bhána from an Irish session at the Arthouse bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about a question that I get asked quite a bit, which is, how hard is it to learn the fiddle? A lot of times, people find out what I do, that I play the fiddle and I teach fiddling. And they'll say, well, I have a violin at home. How hard would it be for me to learn to play the fiddle? And people ask this often with kind of an undertone of: well, I think it's going to be really hard.

Is the fiddle hard, is the violin hard? Sometimes people say is it the hardest instrument. And my response usually begins with while if you look at the history of the fiddle, and fiddle music, it was mostly played by people who were not taught formally. So they weren't taking music lessons, they oftentimes maybe didn't read sheet music. And they weren't studying it at a school.

A lot of Fiddler's were self taught playing out in the country, people playing in the mountains and Appalachia. So it wasn't something that necessarily needed to be taught in a formal way, was pretty easy for people to pick it up and figure it out on their own, or with the help of a friend or family member who already played. So it sort of begs the question, why are people so intimidated by learning to play the fiddle?

One of the reasons for this is just that classical violin repertoire can be very difficult if somebody is thinking in their head about fiddle music, and comparing that to maybe what they know a little bit about classical violin and how difficult that is, they might be overly intimidated. In the 19th and the 20th century, the violin was kind of redesigned, you could play even harder music on it. And it became a bit of an extreme sport for composers to just write harder and harder repertoire for the classical violinist to show off what they could do.

It is very difficult to play a lot of that music, you know, you have to have spend many hours, many, many years, a lot of formal training to be able to play those, you know major concertos like Tchaikovsky. But the repertoire of fiddling is much easier, much more doable, much more accessible to everyone, not just people within the world of violin.

I think another thing that contributed kind of more recently to this idea that it's very hard to learn the violin or the fiddle is just the advent of the Suzuki method. Suzuki was a Japanese violin teacher in the middle of the 20th century. Suzuki wanted to teach violin to very, very young children, preschoolers, aged 3, 4, 5. I mean, if you've ever met a four year old...

So Suzuki in order to help these very young children play the violin, he kind of broke everything down into really tiny little steps. And in some ways, it led to this attitude that if you don't get every single step correctly, if you miss something, or you develop one bad habit, like that's it, you didn't do it right, you're not going to get the sound that you want, you're not going to play the music that you want.

Honestly, I have seen in adults, a lot of worry about their own playing and their own technique and the way that they learn that can even lead to excess tension, where they're trying to get something exactly right. And maybe they're holding it at the angle that you know somebody told them to, but their body is so stiff and tense while they're doing it that it's interfering with their playing in other ways.

So there are a lot of things in classical violin, in Suzuki violin, that fiddlers don't even need to worry about especially when you're learning and as an adult. The main thing I say to people is you just have to play. You just have to put the fiddle under your chin, put the bow on the string and just play and you'll get better.

The best example I have of this is a fiddler named Noah VanNorstrand. Noah and Andrew are brothers and they both play multiple instruments. When I was younger, they came and taught at my fiddle camp so I got to know them a little bit. And even when we were younger than that, they grew up in Syracuse, which is where I grew up.

So when I was in college, Andrew was an up and coming teenage fiddler and Noah was his little brother who was playing the drums at the time. Noah would pick up the fiddle and try to play it. And it was, you know, it sounded like somebody who was trying to teach themselves play the fiddle. Didn't sound great when he first started out, I hope Noah is okay with me saying that. Now Noah plays really well. And you know if you heard him, it would just knock your socks off.

We have this wonderful moment at Fiddle Camp. One of the questions that kids always like to ask visiting artists is how much do you practice? So they asked this of the VanNorstrand brothers, how much do you practice? And Andrew answered the question first and said, "Well, you know, we, we play a lot, we rehearse, we perform, we play with our friends. So there's a lot of playing music in our lives that's not necessarily practicing." But then he went on to talk about his process for trying to work out new things and get a handle on a tune or a technique that he hadn't mastered.

And then he says, to the kids, but Noah never practices. And all their little jaws drop, because at this point, they've heard Noah they hear how good he is. So Noah says, yep, if practicing is sitting down and trying to get better, and work something out on your own, I never do that. I just play. I just play with people. I just play for my own pleasure. I perform, and I get better that way.

It really isn't an exact science, I think you can find ways to get better, and you can also just get better by playing. So my answer is, it's really not that hard to learn the fiddle, you can do it.

Our tune today is from an Irish session that is right here in Baltimore, where I live. It was a session at the Arthouse, which is a bar in the Hamden neighborhood. The tune is Na Ceannabháin Bhána, which is a slip jig in G major.

The session scene and Baltimore has been in flux for a few years. I don't go to that many sessions. But my husband is a flute and guitar player, plays a lot of things actually. And he goes to more sessions than I do. And I know that the upheaval in the restaurant and bar scene, especially connected to the pandemic meant that a lot of bars closed that hosted sessions.

And this session had settled in the Hon, which was a restaurant in Hamden, then the Hon closed. And so now, for now, on Wednesday nights, they are meeting at Arthouse. This tune is from a set of slip jigs played by Meghan Mette, who's a great fiddler, multi instrumentalist from the Baltimore area. She does teach, I think she teaches, you can look her up Google Meghan with an H, Mette M E T T E.

She had a set of slip jigs at this session and they sounded so good. This jig when I looked around for information on it, I found some words actually Irish language words to it. It was collected and played by Seamus Ennis, A pipes player mostly from Dublin.

I also saw that maybe this jig had been located in County Galway, Ireland. And there are Irish language lyrics may be written by Colm Ó Caoidheáin about looking for grandchildren, so Na Ceannabháin Bhána, Ceannabháin is the surname, like the last name and it means the little fair kids. So the lyrics describe looking for these fair haired children in the garden. Go look on Wikipedia and see the lyrics there. We're gonna play it through for you here. Okay.