Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddle. I'm Megan Beller. And today I'll be bringing you a setting of Dinny O'Brien's from a session at the Arthouse bar in Baltimore, Maryland.
Hello, everyone, I hope you're well. Today I'm going to be talking about what to make of fiddle sheet music. Because when you look at fiddle tunes written out on the page, they look very different on the page, from what you hear, there's a lot that's not written down. That may be old news to you. But I'm going to talk about how we got there and kind of what to do about it.
I did this workshop when I was in college for for these other classical violinists at Eastman. I've done this workshop a few times for classical players, I like to use the tune Growling and Grumbling, and I give them the sheet music. And then I play it classically.
And then I start to layer on top of that the different aspects of fiddle technique. So I'll add exons on to and for a little bit of swing, I'll put a bite in shorten up my bow strokes speeded up at drones, add some improv in, it sounds totally different. And when classical players, I take them through this, and they always ask, why don't you write this into the music? Well, why is the music just written out as playing eighth notes when you're doing all this other stuff?
Well, the first way that I talk about that is that with classical music, sometimes it's sort of imagined in someone's head. And it's written out before, it's played, you know, by a string quartet, or sung by a soprano or whatever, however, it's going to be performed, so sort of written and then performed and interpreted.
With fiddling, the writing is coming after, I mean, in many cases, years or decades after the tune has been composed or developed, passed down. And then even when the tune is finally written down, it's sometimes written down by players without a lot of classical notation experience. So they're basically writing it down as in like a real book from jazz, where it's just the lead sheet, just the basic melody. And then depending on what style of fiddling you use, there may be different elements that you add to that.
I mean, sometimes the exact same tune can be played by a Quebecois player in a really energetic almost kind of jerky syncopated style, or played by an Irish player with a lot of ornamentation, or played by an Old-Time player where they simplify the tune down and add a lot of drones and double stops and slides. There isn't really one way to write out how a fiddle tune should sound because it really depends on the player and their interpretation of the tune.
So that leads me to a little bit of a high horse. I like to argue that learning fiddle learn to play the fiddle learning fiddling isn't about tunes. Isn't that crazy? Yeah, it's not learning tunes. I know. We spend all this time learning tunes. I spend a lot of time making videos for learning tunes. When I'm playing in lessons with people we're doing a lot of tunes. Tunes, tunes, tunes.
You need some tunes to learn with, like, you need something to apply the style to. But the tunes don't necessarily make it fiddling. It's the style the way you're playing it. Yeah, actually, in Fiddle Camp, we have some fiddle players come in, and they're like, you're just, they have this complaint. If they just see we're teaching lots of tunes to the kids.
I remember Andrew Van Nordstrand, saying, you know, you're just teaching tunes, you need to be teaching them a style. Well, here's the thing is we're teaching them tunes, but it's completely by ear. So while they're learning the tunes, they're learning the style at the same time. So when you're learning by ear, you get both.
But if you're learning off the page, you're not getting that style, but not to worry, you can still learn the style. I actually in my little book three I did some transcriptions of my own playing. But you know, that's not a perfect fix, like That's just how I play it. It's to give you an example, you can go through and learn these different aspects of fiddle style, practice them, either on one note or on one string, put them in a scale, put them in an easy, you know, a part or B part, and then stick them in a tune. And that's how I like to do it.
And I find that once I go through with somebody with a slurring pattern, or getting the muse to accenting do that a few times, they get it and they can start to apply it to tunes that they've learned without that style, either from the page or by ear.
That is what I will be doing in some of my courses. I'm creating courses. Right now for fiddle studio, there'll be part of a membership. And there'll be a bowing course that's jig, kind of jig slurs and shuffles. There'll be a lot of that fiddle style. And there'll be some other courses that focus on style. If only it could all be written there on the page, then we could get it exactly right. But would that really be as much fun? Probably not.
The tune today is called Dinny O'Brien's and this is a real in D Mixolydian. It's got the C sharp, it's got the C natural kind of goes back and forth. It's one of those tunes. It was written by Paddy O'Brien. Paddy O'Brien was a very famous accordion player and composer of Irish music. And his father was Dinny O'Brian was also an Irish musician played accordion, I believe and also fiddle. They lived in Tipperary.
So Dinny was the dad, Paddy was his son grew up playing, even as a teenager I think, played professionally in Ireland, and his whole life wrote a ton of tunes. He has passed away but his daughter, Eileen O'Brien, has collected many of his tunes. If you're interested in Paddy O'Brien tunes, you can go to Eileen O'Brien fiddle, and she has a collection there that she's pulled together of her dad's tunes you can order it.
Mick Brown says that this tune was Patty's first composition. I don't know, kind of a complicated tune. One more story about this tune from the late accordion player Jim Coogan, from New York who said that the BC box player accordion speak Joe Madden learned this tune while traveling in a car on his way to done bargain. Were then he won the all Ireland he promptly won the all Ireland to row accordion championship playing this tune.
So just learn it in a car and you can win all Ireland or something. Okay, I don't think I'll be winning all Ireland with it, but I'm gonna do my best here we go.
Thanks for listening, you can head over to fiddle studio.com to find sheet music for this tune and more information about becoming a member of fiddle studio. I'll be back next time with another tune for you have a wonderful day.
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