Sitting or Standing (On the Loose)

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Welcome to the Fiddle Studio Podcast featuring tunes and stories from the world of traditional music and fiddling. I'm Meg Wobus Beller and today I'll be bringing you a setting of On the Loose from my album Broke the Floor by Meg Wobus and Charley Beller. 

Hello everyone, I hope you are well. Today we're going to be talking about sitting vs standing for playing the fiddle what? But first a quick word about reviews. The place where you can leave a review of a podcast is on Apple Podcasts that site and thank you to two lovely reviews I got recently from New Fiddler with Big Ears and Drew Reynolds. Thank you so much for those reviews. 

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Anyway, let's talk about this topic. Gosh, I haven't been playing a lot of fiddle. I've just been playing the concertina lately and having a lot of fun with that and our guitar, my father's Martin guitar, has been in the shop for six or seven weeks and it's coming back next week. So in my house there'll be a little bit of fighting over who gets to play the guitar between me and my husband when it comes back. 

Should you sit or stand to play the fiddle? This is a silly topic. I like the silly topics the best. You can do anything. You can sit, you can stand, you can lie on the floor. Have you tried lying on the floor? It's kind of crazy. All the angles are different. The gravity works very differently when you're trying to play and you're lying on the floor. But I thought I'd tell you some of my thoughts about it. 

People stand a lot for classical music. In fact it's kind of an issue with kids when I'm trying to teach kids because you're trying to get them to stand a lot, and then they see the cellists and there's always some kids who want to switch to cello just because they can sit. In fact, I have an interview in November coming out with Casey Murray who said that they switched when they were a kid from fiddle to cello partly because of the sitting. 

But the reason that classical players stand so much and this is not an orchestra, but they usually stand to practice and to perform, you know, as a solo is because when you stand up, your body is very aligned. Your back is just naturally straight. You're using your lower body to hold your weight up, your shoulders and your head are more upright and loose and your arms are longer and straight. So you have already set yourself up to be playing the fiddle in a more relaxed and aligned way and you've got your angles a certain way. 

When you're standing up, because your back is straight, it's pretty different from sitting. Even when classical players sit, they try to sit with their back really straight. I will often sit with my back, not touching the back of my chair, if I'm, if I'm sitting to perform in a string quartet or in an orchestra, trying to mimic standing as much as possible, have my feet on the floor and all my weight in my feet the way that I would if I was standing. 

If you're sitting on a couch it's a completely different story. Or kind of slumped in a chair, you've got that curve in your back. Things are collapsing and basically when you're sitting and you're playing the fiddle, you're using your arms, neck, shoulders, head just that very top part of your body to do the work. So you're not standing in a way that your whole body is supported and that maybe your head is just holding the fiddle up and your shoulder and your arm are relaxed and not working so hard to hold. 

I hope I'm explaining this well. Of course I'm not. I'm not a medical professional and I don't know that much about bodies, but I have played standing and sitting up and when you're standing it's easier on your arms and your shoulders and your neck and when you're sitting it's going to put a lot more strain on those. They're going to be working harder. 

You can be more likely to have some pain, some tension, to kind of wear yourself out sitting. Of course, if you're standing, your feet are going to, you know, get tired, you're going to wear yourself out in a different way. So if we just think about sitting and fiddlers sit a lot more than they stand. Okay, so those, those classical players practicing you know, when I was in conservatory practicing two, three hours a day, I was standing that whole time. 

But when I fiddle I usually sit down and partly that's because I don't need perfect alignment and to be completely holding with my head. When I'm playing the fiddle I'm usually playing in first position. I can hold the fiddle with my hand. More it doesn't really matter and I'm not playing things that are so difficult that I'm going to have trouble getting around. Like, if you're trying to shift and you're slumped in a chair, you're going to elbow yourself right in the ribs. 

If you're standing, you're going to have a lot more space and openness to shift around, get around the fiddle. But I don't need to get around the fiddle if I'm playing traditional music, just in first position. If I'm trying to play Tchaikovsky Concerto, I need to get around the violin. So if I'm just playing at home, I sit down and when I teach kids and adults and we're playing fiddle tunes, we usually sit down and then if we're going to play something hard, then I'll have them stand up. 

Or if they're having trouble with your angles, if you've only really played sitting down but you're not happy about your tone, hey, why not try standing up? You may have a change in the angles of your bow and your highway and also a change in the way you put your weight into the string. Gravity is kind of working with you or against you in terms of playing the violin and you might have more success standing up. And also, if you're just one of these people that gets kind of antsy sitting down or your back starts to hurt, try standing up. It's great. 

When I perform for like a full dance, I try to stand up because if I sit, everything just gets too heavy and starts to hurt. I'm actually more likely to kind of have cramping in my left hand playing a full dance. If I'm sitting, for that same reason, like I'm hunching a little, everything's getting heavy, my fingers are getting heavy on the string and my hands clenching too much and I'm gonna start to cramp, whereas if I stand up, I tend to use that drilled into me so many years that lighter, more floating posture and way of playing, and it's more sustainable for a three-hour dance, oh my gosh, anyway. So if you only do one, try branching out, and if you really wanna be crazy, lie down on the floor, try playing that way. 

Our tune for today is called On the Loose. This is a tune that I composed. I haven't shared one of my tunes yet. It's in kind of an old-time style. It's in G major. I wrote it so many years ago. I don't actually remember composing it so I can't tell you what was going through my head, but I do know that I wrote a lot of unusual and experimental tunes and then this was part of an effort of mine to write tunes in a more accessible style that sounded more like traditional tunes. 

I shared this tune online I don't know, maybe it was last year and I remember somebody who watched the Real on Instagram wrote, because I said you know, this is a tune that I wrote. And they said I don't really believe that it's possible you could write this tune because it's just really complicated and I don't think you composed it. I was like, huh, well, I did and it's true, this tune sounds more complicated than it is. 

I love to just take advantage of the little tricks on fiddle with. You know the way double stops work and everything and drones, where you can make it sound a little fancier than it. And it's not that hard to play. It's not as hard as it sounds. I knew you'd write it. The B part for this tune is one of those four bars that repeats, you know, and then the whole B part repeats. You end up playing these big four bar chunks four times. And in the contradance world we use those kinds of tunes for a dance that ends in Petronella, turns, contra corners, even like a tight series of four bar moves, like circles and stars or the balance and the wavy line. So I don't know If you know about contra dancing. That's what I use those repetitive B parts for. 

We are sharing tunes from our album this month, so this tune is off my new album which is called Broke the Floor. It's me playing fiddle, my husband Charley is playing guitar and we will be back next month with some old time tunes for you. I think I have an old time jam to pull tunes from, but we wanted to give you I don't know a little taste of the album. You can find it online. 

Broke the Floor should be out pretty soon and also available on my bandcamp paying for the digital or the CD. My bandcamp page is actually megwobus.bandcamp.com. Wobus is spelled W-O-B-U-S as in bus. Anyway, I won't pretend we're gonna play it now. I'm gonna put in a clip from the finally finished and mastered version of our album here for the tune On the Loose by Meg Wobus Beller.