Brendan Taaffe: Figure Eight




Figure Eight

This will begin a regular column on Irish fiddle style. I’ll be aiming the bulk of the column at players who have the notes under their fingers, but are still searching for an authentic voice in the Irish tradition. That means we’ll cover fingered ornamentation and repertoire, but will focus mostly on the bow. To quote Matt Cranitch: “The whole art of it is in the bowing.” There are various important caveats that I should make, two of which I’ll give now: not all Irish players bow things the same way, and there is a great deal of scope for personal variation and idiosyncracy. That said, however, there’s enough common ground that we can come up with some things to make your playing sound more “Irish”.

You have to start somewhere, and I’ll begin with a string-crossing figure that pops up in innumerable reels. In the excerpt from Jackie Coleman’s below it’s the figure in measures 2 and 3: a constant note on the lower string, sounding repetitively between changing higher notes. For your left hand, there’s not much to it. In m. 2, you hold the F# while sounding the A and B, and your finger needs to be positioned cleanly enough that you can keep it in place and get clear notes on the string above. In m. 3, you roll your index finger to cover both the E and the B, leaving your third finger free to sound the D. The trick is in weaving your bow across the strings to make the melody smooth. If you were to use all single bow strokes, you would start with an up-bow on the first quarter note. All of the subsequent down-beat eights will fall on a down-bow, all of the off-beats on the up. Doing so, your wrist will move in a circular pattern, and the key to making these string crossings as smoothly as possible is to not move your bow more than necessary. Keep the wrist circle small, and only bring the bow off of the D string just enough to sound a clean A string. No more.

Crossing strings with single bows is hard to do cleanly at speed, and tends to make the melody bouncier than it wants to be, so the standard approach is what I think of as a figure-eight pattern. As shown in example 2, you take the first two notes together on a down-bow, piece together the next three notes on an up-bow (D string, A string, D string) and end with separate bows. Instead of a circle, your wrist will be moving in a figure-eight pattern (figure 3). Like the circular motion you will want to keep your movement confined to a small place, only lifting the bow as much as necessary to sound notes cleanly. The most challenging part of the pattern will likely be the three-note up-bow slur, involving two string crossings. Practice just this part of the pattern, concentrating on as smooth a crossing as possible. The astute among you will notice that example 4 is a very similar pattern that gets you to the same place and avoids the more complicated slur. But it also avoids crossing the beat with your slurring pattern, something that always lends great interest to a tune. We’ll explore crossing the beat in much more detail in future columns, but the basic principle is that asymmetrical patterns keep your audience off-guard and interested. Example 2, though it might seem harder at first, is worth the practice. And it’s a pattern with a great number of advantages: the asymmetry is interesting, it’s very smooth, and it ends opposite where it starts, so you can repeat it endlessly. Indeed, that makes for a good bowing exercise, as in example 5. Executed properly, the lower note will feel like a constant grounding that the higher melody notes pop out of. Akin slightly to a baroque pedal tone, where a constant bass makes the melody above it more interesting.

Practice this pattern until it feels completely natural and you can insert it at will into the tune of your choice. Once you’ve gotten to that point, there are some nice variations to consider. The first, example 6, is just a substitution of a triplet for the leading quarter note. This works best if you are a down-bow triplet player, as I am; simply tie the last note of your triplet to the open A, and you’re off into the pattern. If you are an up-bow triplet player, you would need to bow the open A on a separate bow from your triplet to maintain the pattern, or bow everything opposite. Example 7 changes the rhythm of the passage by substituting a roll for the opening note and adjusting accordingly. It can be a breath of fresh air in a tune that returns to this pattern frequently, as in Jackie Coleman’s. Example 8 shows two alternative ways of weaving among the strings; one that returns you to where you started and one that puts you on a different foot. I think of these as being slightly bouncier than the standard approach, and again can bring a fresh look when you’ve repeated the tune a lot of times. Once you’ve mastered the bowing exercise with the standard figure, you can go back and insert the variations until you are fully comfortable with them all.

Next time we’ll look at bowing patterns for jigs and pay particular attention to slurring across the beat as a way to make our jigs interesting.

Happy practicing.