Playing fiddle for a dance (Grieg's Pipes)

Sheet music for Grieg's Pipes as played in Baltimore. Hear the tune and discussion on the Fiddle Studio podcast on Apple Music or on Spotify!  

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 Grieg's Pipes from a session at the Arthouse Bar in Baltimore, Maryland.

Hello, everyone, I hope you are well. Today I'm going to be talking about playing fiddle for a dance. I just played for a dance. I guess it was last weekend. That was a contra dance down in Glen Echo, which is an old amusement park outside of DC. And I had a great time there I played with my husband played mostly guitar, and Ken Kolodner, played on fiddle and hammer dulcimer. And Rachel Edie played Rachel kind of brought everything so it was fiddle, mandolin, guitar, banjo, all the things. We had a great time. 

I have been playing for dances for a long time. I guess it's going on. I guess it's going on 30 years now. And I want to talk about two parts of playing for dancers. One is what tunes work well for dancers, in terms of the fiddle tunes that you're picking, if you're going to play for a dance. And I'll talk a little bit about what it's like to play live for dancers. 

But let's start with the tunes. When I first started playing for dances, I was a teenager and I knew some fiddle tunes. So basically, I just played the tunes I knew I didn't think at all about how the tunes worked for dancing. I didn't really dance then. So it would have been hard for me to understand. For a few years, I wouldn't have been able to say anything to you about this topic. 

There was something that happened that opened my eyes to this whole world of thinking about dance tunes, and matching them to dancing and thinking about how well they work for dancing. And that was there was a great caller and fiddler. A dance caller is somebody who teaches and leads dancing at square dance or a contra dance. His name was David Smuckler in Syracuse. And he used to do a workshop on chestnuts which were the old, very traditional New England dances. 

So David did these cracking chestnuts workshops to try to basically help callers who're teaching mostly modern dances. Learn some of the original dances like Chorus Jig, Petronella, which is the tune that my band Contranella is named after my dad and I would play for the workshop. We were the kind of the house band for that my dad played piano, I played fiddle. So we had a very traditional and New England sound. And I knew all the New England tunes because I had grown up with them. 

Being around all of those callers, I started to hear a lot more opinions about what tunes worked for dances, and what dances and what tunes were good for dancing and what tunes were not good for dancing. And it basically opened my eyes to a whole world of getting into the weeds with dance tunes, because these were folks who thought about it all the time. So that was kind of what got me into thinking about what makes a good dance tune. 

If you're starting from square one, the tune needs to be well square, it has to have 32 bars, because most dances are exactly 32 bars long. And the tune has to match the dance. Very important in terms of once you've got all squared tunes, what makes a tune good for dancing. 

I imagine the melody of some of these fiddle tunes and the shape of the melody. If you have kind of what's known as a march-y tune with a lot of longer notes. And maybe if you pictured the notes or the shape of the melody, it would be very boxy. Something like on the road to Boston. Dun dun did it um bom bom bom bom. done done that um, bom bom. It's got arpeggios. It's got repeated notes. If you kind of drew it out as a line, it would be flat lines and boxes, stairs. It makes these shapes around the beat that are very easy to step to. 

If you have a tune with a lot of notes, like an especially maybe an Irish tune, where the notes go up and down on all over the place. And if you were looking at kind of a line drawing of the shape of the melody, it would be little wiggles up in squiggles down and big jumps. Even just in your in your head, if you try to picture dancing on top of that, it's harder for the dancers to dance to a tune they can't hum. 

So that's the danger of picking really complicated Irish reels for dancing. It's not to say you can't pick reels that have a lot of notes because a tune like Growling and Grumbling, French Canadian, it has a lot of notes, but in the A part, it's a very repetitive pattern. So it sort of makes a danceable shaped by the data, data, data, data, data, data, data, data, that data that data, data data. 

I'm building these little melodic blocks that you can step into, I don't know, I'm kind of a visual person, sometimes. This is just the picture in my head. When I'm looking at a tune listening to a tune thinking about if it's going to be good for dances. Yeah, if it helps you, New England tunes tend to work really well, because they are very boxy. They're sometimes called dorky, but they have a lot of arpeggios, repeated notes, kind of broad rhythms, broad strokes.

They have fallen out of style a little bit, people like something a little more exciting, a little more driving, to dance to a little more modern sounding, I like to pick something pretty straightforward to dance to, especially for the first tune of a set. So when they start the dance, all of the dance moves being called out are unfamiliar to the dancers. So that's the most important time to play music that's really easy to step to guides the dancers through the beat, and shows them where to stop. So you don't want something really syncopated to start with, or something very nodi, where it's hard to find the beat, or it's you know, three against for the beats off placed. 

For the first tune in the set, you want it to be very straightforward. For the end of the set, I like to pick something and this has less to do with the rhythm of the tune. But you look for a tune that sounds very epic, very ending, soaring. These big a major tunes, tunes even like, here's a Keith Murphy tune called Epic Real. When you hear us tune that has a really epic sound, and maybe the chord structure, you can put in a lot of minor subs, then that's a nice tune to end the set with. 

So you want to kind of look at the rhythmic setup, the shape of the melody, and then the personality of the tune. When you're putting sets together that's putting sets together, I could do a whole podcast on that. But the quick and dirty way to put that together is just to go either up one step or go up a fourth, you always kind of want to be rising energy towards the end of the dance, the dancers get to know the tune better and better. 

Sometimes the leader will stop calling up the moves, the dancers know it well. And you want to keep the energy up so that they can, as they know the moves more, it becomes more comfortable in their bodies, they can just let loose and let that rising energy of the band carry them through the end of the dance. While you're playing for a dance. Let's see, what do I want to say about this, the dance moves that are mostly walking like a star to the left star to the right, a dosey. doe down and back even a swing tend to work in note ear tunes or no to your parts of tunes. 

What I like to do if a tune is not nobody in an area with, you know, a star and then the star back with lots of walking. I'll just add notes and make that nobody because they're walking and the notes kind of carry them around. There are dance moves that are more rhythmic things like the balance where you're going step by step, step by step. And so there are tunes that actually have that rhythm in them. 

If you can pick the tune, or you can modify the tune on the fly to match the step, something like a bounce and swing or even the forward and back then that can feel really great for the dancers. I love to do that. Basically when I'm playing for dancers, I'm watching them. I can tell if my tempo was working. Because if they're kind of finishing a move and then waiting to start the next move because that means I'm I'm going too slowly. And if they're rushing and they're late for their moves, I'm going too fast. So try I had to make my tempo match them so that their figures start and end at the right time. And then they're in the groove. 

When you see them letting loose and doing some fancier stuff and getting a little more flamboyant, really enjoying themselves, that's usually my cue. They're comfortable, they know this dance, well, they're enjoying the music. And that's when I'll tend to let loose a little more and start to improvise more or build a big time through the tune over a drone or do something exciting and kind of attention grabbing, I can match their feel in that way. 

It is a long time playing for dance, 10 minutes, sometimes 15 minutes. So bring back up. Try to have another melody player if you can. 

Our tune today is a set of Greg's pipes or Griec's pipes. It's a reel, a traditional Irish real that we played at the Art House bar. This is a session in Baltimore on Wednesday nights. The session is run by Richard Osban. He is a local Irish musician. He's a really nice guy and plays kind of everything. I mean, plays guitar really well plays fiddle, Irish guitar, old time fiddle, plays banjo. He was telling me about some tunes he was learning on the accordion. So one of these people, please everything and has really committed to putting together a session every Wednesday, which is a big commitment, and I really appreciate it because it means I get to play Irish music on Wednesday nights. It's a really nice, lovely session. 

This tune is a three part real. Apparently in County Clare. It's called Connelly's, but mostly known by Greg's pipes or Craig's pipes. We did the three part version. Apparently, Conal O'Grada recorded a five part version of this reel. So some people play a five part version. 

The three part version was recorded by the Flanagan brothers in New York. If you don't know about the Flanagan brothers, they were three brothers in New York. They had grown up in Ireland and then moved with their parents, I think in the in the teens like 19 teens. And then when they were older, they all played their instruments very well. 

There was a big Irish Dancehall scene in the 20s. And even in the 30s in New York, and they were very popular, very energetic, very sought after. For that scene. It was Joe Flanagan on the accordion. Mike, Mike was on mandolin. Later tenor banjo, and Lou Flanagan was on guitar, I think at first was playing banjo accompaniment and then switched to guitar. I've heard that that the guitar wasn't that common as an accompaniment instrument in Irish music before that. So Lou Flanagan was part of a more modern sound.

 The two brothers played accordion and tenor banjo melody in unison and then Lou would accompany them on the guitar. Sounds like what you would hear all the time these days. But at the time that was that was less common. Not sure if there's a composer on this, it's often just mark traditional. 

Yeah, it was printed by O'Neill and O'Neill said that Joshua Campbell had composed this reel and printed it in the year 1779 People have found have found it printed before that, unfortunately, doesn't seem like O'Neill had gotten to the bottom of that mystery and I did not either. We have really enjoyed working on this tune. G major real for you. Ready? Here we go.