Fiddling Demystified

Donna Hébert

Fiddleblog

Donna’s Jig by Tony Parkes

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May 26, 2024 

Saying goodbye to Tony Parkes

I am grateful to be playing music with dear friends today at the Concord Scout House honoring Tony Parkes. Tony and I were young adventurers together, starting dance series at the Scout House, inventing new traditions, and though we didn’t know it then, seeding the contradance tradition in many dancers and musicians who planted those seeds wherever they landed.

Tony remains the greatest caller for me. The musicality of his calling, his perfect phrasing, the lack of ego, his mind and eyes on the dancers the whole time, all made him a master. It was easy as pie to play for him and he thought the same of me. When we met, he was flabbergasted to find out I had live session tapes of one of his fiddling heroes in the car. A number of years later, we took great joy in inviting said fiddling hero to play our Scout House dance. Tony and I shared a true passion for the fiddle music of the northeast, especially Quebec and Maritime music and a lot of those tunes were on our roster wherever we played.

He and I were in agreement that the musical phrasing of a tune needs to fit that of the dance to enhance the experience for the dancers. It couldn’t be haphazard. But rather than insisting on a certain rote tune, it came down to what the groove of the dance was and what tune would bring out that groove. We programmed that together as fiddler and caller and learned quickly that some grooves are easier to dance in. We knew we’d nailed it when the dancers let go with something approaching a holler. There’s an elegance and a simplicity of purpose when everything clicks like that. A moment where you don’t feel ridiculous saying “This! This is what I’m meant to do!” You might think it’s just a dance, but it’s really not just a dance. It’s a moment in time when people are willingly cooperating with each other, moving together, following subtle musical cues and direction from the caller and then BAM! You are really in sync, dancing as one!

Yup, pure magic! Thanks, Tony!

Tony also wrote a wicked danceable jig that’s a joy to play – give it a try and pass it on!

La marche des femmes / The March of the Women

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On Saturday January 21, The Women’s March proved to be the biggest world-wide protest in recorded history. Almost five million people, including an estimated 1 in 100 women in the the U.S. and their male allies, took to the streets. Not just of one city, but of 673 cities around the world. Protests occurred on all seven continents, including Antarctica! We are mighty and now we know we are anything but alone in our worldwide support for social justice.

When I wrote this tune in 1984, I wasn’t trying for prophecy. I didn’t even know how to notate it. Waltz time? Really? But isn’t it a march? So, I guess it just happens to be in three, with an odd bar of four where, I surmise, the women stop to pick up a child or help an elder. But we keep right on marching.

The recording is from a 2013 Panache Quartet demo. Andrea Beaton, Véronique Plasse and Jane Rothfield are the other fiddlers. I play lead throughout.

Here’s a PDF copy in treble clef of La marche des femmes. Share it with my blessing and the writing credit.

Music is our birthright!

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Peggy and Her Range Riders - 1938. My mom Peggy is on the left, her sister, Theresa, on the right
Peggy and Her Range Riders – 1938. My mom Peggy is on the left, her sister, Theresa, on the right

Music is a gift we receive from our parents and give to our children. That’s if we’re lucky. I was. My mother sang and played with her family as a child. As the eldest of four, I shared music with her before we had a television in the house. I sang along with her songs as a toddler. And I’m still surprised to know the obscure verses to jazz standards that were sung on the radio in the fifties.

Children are little sponges with wide open minds. We owe it to them to direct their study toward music and the arts in general, but particularly toward music. Children need to learn the cooperative life skills that music teaches by natural example.

Shared family music provides a constructive long-term activity that creates a dialogue where learning occurs but isn’t forced. It creates stronger communication among family members, deeper emotional bonds, and an appreciation for the joyful results of successful teamwork.

playing with my daughter Molly March 2015 in Québec. Shawn McEnroe photo
playing with my daughter Molly in March 2015 in Québec. Shawn McEnroe photo

Folk music families often participate together in informal and formal performances. My daughter sings and plays bass with me in two of my groups. Another music partner performs with her husband and daughter and another friend plays with her parents and her sister in Cape Breton. And even if we’re not related by blood, those we play with tend to become so close they are considered family. This music-making thing is so much more than a ‘family business’ though. On a purely practical level, you’d probably pass it by. Not enough money to be made, you’d think, not enough time to practice or play.

But we measure joy in deep satisfaction, not dollars and cents. The day my daughter went to bat with me about the emotional content of her chord choice and went on to talk about telling a story in a song lyric, my heart sang. Music gave us a common language where we could be peers, not parent-child.

I didn’t even know what I was doing at age four, singing with my mother. I just sang the harmony. Singing now with daughter Molly, I see our stitches in the tapestry being woven, generations of voices singing down the years. My mother’s mother sang to her, she sang to me. I sang to Molly. She will sing to her children someday.

Backstage view: Great Groove Band - Philly Folk Fest 2014
Backstage view: Great Groove Band – Philly Folk Fest 2014

Encouraging our children to partake fully of the arts is important. They need to be drawing, writing, singing, playing an instrument, dancing, learning to build something, to garden or cook or sew or craft as part of their education. They shouldn’t just be consuming media on their electronic devices. We want them creating!

Molly and I both feel strongly about this – it’s not just philosophy. We’re part of the posse for the Great Groove Band, a program I started in 1998 with the support of Andy Spence at Old Songs Festival in Altamont NY.  Molly was ten that year, grew up at Old Songs, and is now the Groove Band vocal coach at both festivals. We were asked to develop a second program in 2006 at the Philadelphia Folk Festival and just celebrated our tenth year there.

We invite you to attend either (or both) festivals and bring your young musician (age 6-17) to our performance training program. Our staff are music teachers with lifelong performance experience and we welcome young singers and all acoustic instruments including percussion. There are two instrumental performance ensembles at Old Songs, one for teen instrumentalists, while Philly always produces a larger crop of singers!

We provide music and listening downloads several months in advance for both ensembles, who learn songs and tunes and how to play together by ear. At the festivals, they share in arranging decisions, learn stagecraft and create a 20-minute main-stage opener for the Sunday afternoon show.

Contact me (donna AT fiddlingdemystified.com) or Molly Hebert-Wilson (mollyhebertwilson AT gmail.com) for more information about participating in the program at either festival or to discuss how we can help you create your own festival Groove Band experience.

Here’s one performance – 2014 at Philadelphia Folk Festival – an Old-Time song called “Mole in the Ground.”

Donna Hébert – 3/30/15

Intro to Fiddling Demystified

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I am editing the intro to my 2006 Fiddling Demystified for Strings and thought the musings on learning to fiddle were blog-worthy. Some of the material covered in the book is also in the numbered lessons in my blog. Free sample pages.

Fiddling – a collection of cultural and regional folk violin styles – is mysterious and mutable, morphing from phrase to phrase, seeking the elusive, satisfying groove. Drummers at heart, we mine melodies for rhythms, teasing them out with our bows to make people dance! We nudge the rhythms along, swapping one for another in a spiral of variations. We tinker with the music because we must. We are fiddlers!

So how do we tinker? What do we change and when do we change it? Fiddling Demystified presents a practical, left/right hand, tune-by-tune, lick-by-lick foundation for understanding fiddling. I dig deep into each tune, detailing the sets of licks, rhythms and ornaments that define regional styles. There are 32 reels, waltzes, jigs, pipe marches, airs and a Cajun two-step here, each one decked out in its own style. Fourteen are originals, written by others and myself. The Practical Guide to Fiddling Style Markers, a four-part glossary of fiddle licks and lore, demonstrates dozens of subtle ways that fiddlers can mess with a melody, our raison d’être, after all.

For fiddling IS improvisation and variations. We punctuate with rhythm a little differently on each repetition. We jump the beat, swap slurs around, create variations, syncopated bowings and rhythm licks with the right hand. Simultaneously the left plays ornaments – grace-note flicks, triplets and reverse triplets, duplets, hammer-ons, pull-offs, slides, drones and turns – bending notes in as many ways as possible to keep any one way from becoming tedious. Most fiddlers begin by immersing themselves in the music of one regional style. Over time, we learn to speak in that dialect, and don’t stop with one tune, or even one style, as we discover soon enough.

About orthodoxy: There is no one “right” way to play a tune, regardless of style. I’m not saying style doesn’t matter, or that you shouldn’t have favorite fiddlers or styles, but that there is no Holy Grail. Just because it’s published or recorded by a well-known primary source doesn’t change that fact. Fiddling is, by its nature, self-curated. It is interpretive, diverse, and democratic, and our own renditions change daily. Your iconic recording of that primary source was the way he or she played it that day. Learn it, study it, even, but please don’t enshrine it, or claim to have the one true version, (even if it is your favorite). Mine it for what you love about it, repeat that with multiple sources, then make the music your own.

Using the book and CDs

Families of ornaments and rhythm motifs set each tune in a regional style. To get the most out of Fiddling Demystified, use these left/right-hand technique sets to dress up tunes that you already play. Stick to one style per tune and accessorize each repetition a bit differently and you’ll see where the variations go. Get off the page as soon as possible, and find others to jam with – that’s where the real fun is!

Lessons include chord names, slurs, and accented bowings, all cross referenced with the Guide or the Index. Style markers are in bold italic inside a tune or in the Guide (7-25). Cross-referenced page numbers are italicized in parentheses, and the Index (63) will help you find a specific technique. Tunes are written in cut time rather than 2/4 for easier reading, but at 112-120 beats/minute in reels, play the 8ths as 16ths. Tempo markings are for a half-note in cut time (2/4), quarter-note in waltzes (3/4), and a dotted quarter-note in jigs (6/8).

NOTE: Fiddling Demystified’s viola and cello editions reset the melodies where it is necessary, retaining the fiddle key to allow jamming. Music examples in the Guide are in three clefs. Though not all fiddle ornaments will translate directly to the viola and cello, the rhythms will. I include a general transposition protocol, and some of the tunes are ‘native’ to cello and viola, sharing the same fingering as the fiddle.

This is not a complete theory manual, but has useful lessons on chord names and families, major, minor and modal harmony patterns, and on how to find harmonies and create rhythms. Tip #1: Learn the chords along with each tune. Pay attention to the repetitive patterns. After a dozen tunes in a key, you know that key. Tip #2: Get a mandolin chord book and memorize the chords in Bb, F, C, G, D, A and E and their minors. These both turbo-charge your ability to learn by ear, because now you can predict where the tune is going next.

On the companion CDs, I swing the eighth-notes, common fiddle practice. Waltzes and airs have harmony parts added the second time on the (a) track, with harmony only on the (b) track. Track numbers, tune names and keys are announced in each track. (A) tracks are at reduced speed, with lessons and style markers on the (b) track. (C) tracks play at or near dance tempo, adding variations. Because of disc space, I play only once through for both fast and slow tracks, but try using computer slow-down software like The Amazing Slow-downer™. This handy learning aid loops selected clips and slows the speed while retaining the original note pitches.

Listen to the jam CD several times and hum, sing or deedle along before reading or playing. You will hear more tune layers this way and it will help you decide where to dig into what’s on the menu. Listen carefully for note bendings, dynamic accents, phrasing cues and transitions, drones, syncopations, double-stops or percussive effects – all the interesting stuff that’s missing from a transcription.

You’ll notice bowing differences between the CD and the sheet music. Fiddlers who sight-read learn to interpret sheet music (heresy, but oh-so-liberating!), changing the bowings constantly to keep things moving. Our motto is “never the same way twice!” So, on the slow tracks, I reconciled the first repeats of A and B phrases with each transcription, but the second repeats vary. The faster track is played off the page more. Then the Fiddlejam CD plays the tunes in medleys, creating variations on the fly. Jam along with that CD to practice grooving once you can play the tune, even at slower speeds. Slow the track down with software till you can jam along. Way more fun than a metronome!

Immersion and apprenticeship are the best ways to learn. Check out the NEA’s Master/Apprenticeship Program in the Traditional Arts (state arts councils administer this program), find a great local fiddler and apply to work together. This book and CD are at best an introduction to fiddling styles and performance practice. Find a fiddler in your community and become friends. The rest is up to you.

Acknowledgments

Peggy and Her Range Riders - 1938. Donna's mom Peggy is on the left, her aunt, Theresa, on the right
Peggy and Her Range Riders – 1938. Donna’s mom Peggy is on the left, her aunt, Theresa, on the right
My mother, Mary Margaret (Blair) Hinds, sang and played music with me as a child and made me practice the violin when I was nine. I keep her cowgirl band’s 1938 promo shot on my desktop to remind me to hang on to my dreams. My daughter Molly put up with hundreds of fiddlers and ended up playing the bass. She is one of my music partners today.

Amanda Bernhard (Autumn Frolic), Russell Barenberg (Lullaby/Berceuse), Jane Rothfield (November Wind), Cynthia Thomas (Thanksgiving Waltz), and George Wilson (Sweet Journeys) have allowed me to publish their wonderful tunes in this collection.

Darol Anger is a friend, creative inspiration and a mighty fiddle and jazz violin master. He urged me to publish the book, wrote the foreword, and I wrote Transylvanian Landslide for him in 2003. Renata Bratt tweaked my cello arrangements for playability and fingerings.

Fiddle masters Alan Jabbour, George Wilson, Jane Rothfield, Suzy Thompson, Barbara MacOwen, Seamus Connolly and others help clarify my thinking on the building blocks I call style markers. John McGann answered theory questions. Guitarist Max Cohen reviewed my chord choices and made sensible changes. Thank you all!

My students have taught me so much over the years. Their hunger for music, rhythms and groove matches mine, their questions inspire our research and work together, and their trust keeps my answers honest. The feast of music they bring in the door just makes me grin! So many tunes . . .

Donna Hébert
Amherst Massachusetts, 2014

Lesson #6 – Louis Beaudoin tunes

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Two reels from Louis Beaudoin are shared here. Both were taught at the Festival Memoires et Racines in 2014.

The first is “Reel in D #1” from La Famille Beaudoin (Philo 2022) and the second is a true Franco-American tune, “Eddie’s Reel,” learned from Eddie LeBlanc in Claremont NH. Twenty percent of New England’s population has roots in Quebec. The mp3 link for the second tune is from a 1976 Vermont Public Radio interview. I regret that the Philo recording cannot be sampled here.

Much of the Beaudoin family’s music is archived at the Vermont Folklife Center, which houses several collections of Franco-American traditional music, including the Beaudoin Collection.

Eddie’s Reel

Eddie's Reel

4. Reel in D-1

Louis Beaudoin, Reel in D #1

Lesson #5: The stage as living room

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Do any of you suffer from stage fright? Get panicked about playing in front of other people (including your teacher)? That used to happen to me all the time. I would hear my voice shake when I sang. In my twenties, I’d get so self-conscious at a fiddle contest that I’d blow my set more often than not.

But playing for a contradance was a snap: no one was watching! I ran the weekly dance and was fiddling on stage. But any sense of my own celebrity was extinguished early on when, at half time, one of the women asked if I was having a good time. She hadn’t seen me on the floor before and offered to find me “a good partner, the best way to learn.” I was delighted by her welcome. I comped her admission and took the life lesson gracefully. So much for ‘fame’.

Yet, that invisibility was a gift. I needed that time to fool around with the music, to get my own roots growing in it long enough and deep enough to allow me to bloom. Still, ten years down the road, I worried far too much about what listeners thought of my music. The good news is that it made me practice. The bad news is that I was still scared.

Joining a band where I sang and played lead and backup brought all those insecurities to the fore. It got so bad I’d throw up before going onstage. The following September, I took a ‘day’ job walking door-to-door, canvassing neighborhoods for the environment. We were canvassing for four hours every night, so talking my way into people’s houses became a quickly-honed survival skill.

In June, the band went on the road and I gave up the job for the summer. I was amazed at my new ease, my lack of collywobbles, my downright comfort on a stage. Then it hit me – this audience had self-selected, paid money, chosen to come see us. We already had their money and we didn’t need their signature on a petition. Hot diggetty damn! It felt like they were in OUR living room instead of like I was trying to talk my way into theirs!

That has pretty much been it for me for stage fright. I had a short recurrence 20 years later at a string conference. Looking at the famous people in the front row, I began to feel anxious (knees-knocking scared is more like it) and it must have showed. Also on the bill that night was a lovely man from India, a scholar of Indian violin. We were standing next to each other in the wings. He reached up and put a cool hand on both sides of my face and said, “You will have a very good time on stage tonight.” I could feel my shoulders drop in relief with his words.

It was a blessing, a mantra, and, more importantly, a job description. It’s that simple. When I have a great time on stage, so does the audience. And when I focus on having fun, the inevitable imperfections in performance go by with no emotion attached to them to weigh down the rest of the music. No one but me knows what I meant to play, anyway!

Am I careless in my playing? Anything but. But I am care-FREE, in the moment, speaking to and through the music to the listeners. As in an original Persian rug, there are mistakes, but they’re a gift of my humanity to you. Nothing is perfect, but it can still be full of beauty and honesty and joy.

And that’s what matters. So for all of you struggling with this issue, I wish you:

“A very good time on stage tonight!”

7/21/14 Donna Hébert

Lesson #4: The art of ‘groove’ – (Smith College: 2014)

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31314.Hebertworkshop.SmithFREE WORKSHOP AT SMITH COLLEGE – Bring your instrument! Download handouts below.

I was 23 the summer I fell into fiddling. Four contradances was enough to do it. I started sitting on the stage. Next thing you knew I was talking to the musicians. Word filtered back through them to the caller that I used to play. Then one day at the Concord Scout House “NEFFA on Sunday” dance, the caller walked up to me at the break with a fiddle under his arm. “Here,” he said, thrusting it into my hands. “Sit in the back. There’s music in the bag. Don’t mess with the beat.” It was 1972. The caller was Dudley Laufman, the fiddler was Allan Block and the pianist was Bob McQuillen. That was how I came to play with the Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra.

Dudley Laufman
Dudley Laufman

Yup, there was music in the bag. Two huge LL Bean bags full. My sight-reading skills did not include reading sixteenth notes at 120 beats per minute, so I bought the LPs to listen to. Over and over and over. I bought three copies of each record. My Sears Silvertone record changer was primitive enough to allow me to slow the record down by almost half. With my thumb. Then I could record the resulting, octave lower output on my mono Sony tape recorder, my first ear training tool. Made the tunes sound a bit ‘wubba wubba’ but the rhythms popped out. Still, the fiddles were buried in the big band sound. The LPs only lasted awhile before I destroyed them with my primitive ‘learning by ear’ technology, laughable by today’s standards. And I still didn’t have the fiddle knack I was looking for.

Allan Block, circa 1970s.
Allan Block, circa 1970s.

So, I began watching the fiddlers at the dance. Allan Block was the clear leader (he sat next to the piano, and had a microphone). After awhile, I stopped worrying about hitting every note on the page and began to play less and less, kind of trancing a little on the repetitive nature of both the dance and the tune. Must have been a modal tune, maybe Em/D, one of those where it’s easy to zone out. Next thing you know I’m copping Allan’s right hand movements and [hot DAMN!] sounding just the least little bit like him. Not all the notes, but the rhythms, and I’m dancing inside!

Not long after, Allan took me under his wing and showed me the really cool basics (link to lesson #3) of bowing rhythms. Within a few years, I was “messing with the beat” in my own bands, a practice I honed and practiced by subdividing and syncopating dance phrases at thousands of contradances. Talk about altered states. To this day, my right hand groove owes a whole lot to Allan Block.

We lost Allan last year, and Bob McQuillen left us in February 2014. Big giant shoes to fill. Bob was a prolific composer of fiddle tunes (more than 1500), all dedicated to friends. Perhaps his best-known tune is “Amelia,” a waltz in D major.

Bob McQuillen (Brie Morrissey photo)
Bob McQuillen (Brie Morrissey photo)

We’ll use “Amelia” as part of this lesson. It’s a lovely piece, using all the chords we need to review in D major. We’ll learn the tune, learn to follow the chords and find some harmonies and maybe a countermelody or two. Then we’ll play some faster tunes in the two most common ‘modal’ patterns we find in Celtic music. Both Irish and Scottish minors are almost entirely Dorian (Em/D, Am/G, Dm/C, etc) and Scottish bagpipes carry a flatted seventh in their scale, so are naturally Mixo-Lydian (A/G, D/C). “Swallowtail Jig” is from my “Fiddling Demystified for Strings”:

Marching Down 5th Ave. is a Mixo pipe march in A that I wrote the week my daughter went off to live in an NYU dorm on 5th Ave. She called me every day walking up 5th Ave. to acting classes in Chelsea. The tune is played AABBCCDD. Rhythm players often leave the third out of chords behind ‘modal’ tunes, making the third even more bendable.

Swallowtail Jig is a standard in the contradance and Irish fiddling repertoire. It’s a great Irish Dorian tune, and can carry a lot of ornament or not very much, your taste being the deciding factor. Pick and choose from the menu of ornamentation shown in the tune. This is my classic “what you see in a fiddle tunebook” and “what we really play” example, showing both the basic, un-styled setting, and a fully-styled one. [NOTE: Remember that taking away is as important as adding. Try adding fewer ornaments and stretching rhythms instead!]

You can download the learning aids below for the workshop on March 13 at Smith College, where I teach fiddle instruction and performance.

I was lucky. I could study Allan Block’s right hand from behind and intuit rhythms from his movements, all the while listening to Bob McQuillen’s rock-solid groove. This workshop format allows me to be the groove-master in the room. I can turn my back on the class, and instead of them trying to figure out what I’m doing while mirrored, participants can follow my actual movements and pick up the rhythms more easily.

Wish you could all be there. It’s an honor to pass on the lore and the music of such great players.

LEARNING AIDS (download by clef )

>> Amelia © Bob McQuillen (used with permission). Treble  •  Alto  • Bass
>> Amelia – chord chart in D major with all 3 minor substitutions
YouTube of Glen Echo dance 2/17/14 playing “Amelia”

>> Swallowtail Jig (traditional). Treble 1 – Treble 2  •  Alto  • Bass

>> Marching Down 5th Ave. © Donna Hébert Treble  •  Alto  • Bass

>> C-D-A-E Diatonic triads and broken (2-note) chords. Treble  •  Alto  • Bass

>> Common progressions with 2-note chords on D & G strings. Treble  •  Alto  • Bass

>> Common-tone chords (chord pairs and the other chords they share). Treble  •  Alto  • Bass

>> Chord Wheel from Fiddling Demystified for Strings

Guest blog: Andrew VanNorstrand: Fiddle Tunes and Three-Dimensional Truth

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Andrew VanNorstrand (right, with brother Noah at left) describes perfectly the mental and emotional process of fiddling. I couldn’t have said it better myself, so I asked to share his observations, which are reprinted with permission from Andrew’s 12/16/13 blog, The Deep Blue Green.

Fiddle Tunes and Three-Dimensional Truth

© 12/16/13 Andrew VanNorstrand. All rights reserved.

What exactly is a fiddle tune? Say you want to play a fiddle tune but you don’t know any. So you go out and buy a book like the Portland Collection or the Fiddler’s Fakebook or something like that. And you open it up and pick a tune and play it through. 32 bars of notes in a particular sequence with chord suggestions. Start at the beginning and stop at the end. Is that a fiddle tune? Is that music? It only takes about 35 seconds to play a fiddle tune once through so maybe repeat it a few times. Seems like a good idea. Dum di dum di diddly dum, dum di dum di die-do. Okay then, I guess that’s it. Wow, fiddle tunes are really super easy. Maybe try playing it faster. Done. Maybe try playing it like, way, way faster. Done. Maybe try playing through 40 more tunes in the book. And… done. So is that it then? Didn’t make any mistakes, played all the notes. What else is there?

This is a scenario I encounter pretty frequently at music camps, especially with folks coming from a background in classical music. These are very capable and accomplished musicians who want to learn how to play fiddle tunes. Which is awesome by the way. But it can get really frustrating for them because while they obviously have no problem playing fiddle tunes accurately there’s still something missing in the overall sound. Something that just doesn’t quite connect. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly. Fiddlers do have some cool “tricks” up their sleeves. Different genres of fiddle music have different stylistic ornamentation so you can add in some double stops or triplets or slides (shout out to the dreaded bluegrass “chops” workshop). There’s often more than one version of a tune so you can learn a whole bunch of variations from a bunch of different sources and switch back and forth between them. Sometimes there might even be space for a little solo of some kind so you can be brave and try out a little improvisation. So is it a fiddle tune now? It’s certainly a lot more complicated. But I’d be willing to bet that it still doesn’t actually sound right.

I like to think about this a little differently. Take some classic tune like Sally Ann or Old Joe Clark or Turkey in the Straw. Now think of the notes in one long ribbon and instead of a repeat sign at the end, wrap that ribbon around so it connects to itself in a big circle. Now think of every single time that tune has been played by every single fiddler that’s ever played it as having it’s own ribbon. And these tune-ribbons just keep wrapping themselves around and around, crossing each other, overlapping each other, twisting and turning until you’ve got this giant three-dimensional ball of a tune. And believe me, old fiddle tunes are massive. They’ve been rolling around pubs and campfires and dance halls and living rooms for centuries. People have poured their lives into these melodies. They’ve crossed oceans and mountains and prairies. They’ve soaked up sun and rain and whiskey and tears to the point where they are literally overflowing with joy and heartache and memories. When you play an old fiddle tune, it’s going to weave it’s own unique path across the face of this huge globe; intersecting at every note with a thousand other paths yet still different because it’s YOU playing it. On your instrument. Right now. And that’s never happened before.

Sometimes we talk about variation, ornamentation and improvisation as if these are tools or techniques; as if they are distinct and separate from the melody, which is somehow morally superior. But that’s not it at all. Whatever you play IS the melody. And you are responsible for every note. Fiddle tunes exist in a constant state of change where every single note has to be played not because it’s correct but because it’s the note you meant to play. There is no safe zone where the tune is some kind of neutral third party. Old Joe Clark doesn’t sound so easy anymore. Here’s the thing… music has to be about stuff. Even (especially?) a simple fiddle tune has to be about something. The raw physical existence of this world is really more than we can handle and we need music and art and stories to help us process life. Nobody cares about the notes you play. I’d say nobody even hears the notes you play. What people hear is the meaning; the reason you chose those notes. Tunes played accurately but without depth have this eerie zombie effect that’s hard to explain but immediately recognizable.

And this is really how I think about truth. Picture that giant fiddle-tune-ball I was talking about earlier. How does the tune go? What does it sound like? Well, walk up real close to it and you’ll hear a beautiful melody. But then the ball shifts a bit and you hear it differently. Still the same tune but in a new voice. Was the first one wrong? Roll the ball some more and the tune just becomes deeper and richer and more varied. And I think that can be scary. There’s this temptation to say “Wait a minute, what’s the real tune? How does it actually go? What’s the real truth?” but there isn’t an answer. Even if you back up and try to see the big picture, there’s always the other side that’s hidden. That’s just the nature of human perspective. Absolute truth exists but we are fundamentally incapable of understanding it. And that’s okay. That’s why we have fiddle tunes.

    Andrew VanNorstrand is a fine fiddler and teacher and performer who plays for dances and concerts with the Andrew/Noah Band and the Great Bear Trio. You can find him at many dance festivals and dance camps, including Fiddle and Dance camps at Ashokan. He and his brother, Noah, are trailblazers in the ongoing contradance music tradition. The torch has been well and truly passed!

    The Andrew/Noah band are at http://www.andrewandnoah.com
    The Great Bear Trio are at http://greatbeartrio.com/Great_Bear_Trio/Home.html
    Listen/watch them (Noah is fiddling, Andrew is on guitar) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HtgyvNFfWEw
    Photo: Noah and Andrew VanNorstrand (Angela Goldberg photo)