Brendan Taaffe: Jig Bowing




Jig Bowing

Last time we looked at a bowing figure that pops up in a lot of reels: in this installment we’ll spend some time talking about jigs. I’m mad about jigs. Their spaciousness allows great scope for ornamentation and variation, and you can treat them in myriad ways: subtle, powerful, slinky, or sweet. But an authentic accent on jigs seems to escape a lot of players; perhaps it’s because of the deceptive simplicity, or because we don’t hear a 6/8 rhythm as much in our everyday lives. Classical training, if you have it, tends to leave players with a stronger down-bow, and that tendency combined with placing the first note of every measure on a down-bow will make a jig sound too measured and, well, a bit dorky.

In jig time, the six beats of the measure are divided into two groups of three eighth notes, with the rhythmic pulse of the tune coming on the first and fourth notes. Because of this strong sense of two pulses in each measure, listeners new to the tradition will often have trouble distinguishing between jigs and reels, which also have two main pulses. There are various bits of folk wisdom to help newcomers distinguish between the two—for a jig you can say “jiggity jiggity” to match the rhythm of the tune. Though, if you’re at a session and trying to impress the locals, you might do so quietly.

For an example, we’ll use the jig Chestnut Street. Admittedly hubristic to use one of my own tunes for the example, I’m hoping one of you will record it for a movie soundtrack and make me a millionaire. And, yes, I realize it has a similar vibe as Calliope House, but it’s hard to write a jig in E and get away from that. Chestnut Street came out in December of 2003, written for a friend in Cambridge.

The most important principle of playing a jig is to slur across the beat. Where, when, and how you do this will determine the flavor of your playing, but it’s slurring across the beat that creates the possibility. That’s a principle that applies to playing reels as well. Looking at Chestnut Street, we can see the places where I’ve chosen to run across the beat. In m. 1, I slur from the B to the G#: this is the weaker beat of the measure so I could probably get away without that slur. But the G#, being such a high, bright note, will pop out of it’s own accord, and I want to make this tune sound sweet and a bit slippery. The far more important slur is the one that comes next, carrying my bow across the last two notes of m.2 to the first note of m.3. Lessening the impact of the first beat of a measure, a stronger beat than the second, is the heart of the matter and doing so gives me some important advantages: I can create my own sense of phrasing, one that’s not dictated by the first beat of each measure, and that sense of phrasing can be asymmetrical. Keeping things uneven will hold the listener’s attention.

Following through the bowing indications shows that most of the slurs follow one of these two patterns, slurring across either the first or second pulse of the measure. One pattern, though, doesn’t go over a beat, and that’s the one that you can see in m.7 and m.8. Here I’ve put the first eight note of the beat on a separate bow and slurred the next two together. This serves the opposite purpose, accentuating the strength of the beat by softening the notes that follow. After all, it is a dance tune and the dancers need to know where they are. On that thought, two important places where I don’t slur across the beat are the beginnings of measures 5 and 13. Because I live in New England, one of my venues for playing is at contra dances, and contra figures happen either in 4 or 8 measure phrases. Putting myself in the position to accentuate the beginning of the major phrases of the tune keeps the dancers (and the caller) happy. But if you’re playing for Irish sets or for listening (I do both of those as well), it’s still nice to have the major phrases of the tune be clear.

I’ve included a few directional markers for your bow to help keep you on track. You’ll notice that I place the majority of my down beats on a down-bow; this feels natural and helps drive the rhythm of the tune. Where I don’t (m.7, m.11), I like how that calls attention to the off-beat. I look to end strong on a down-bow.

For a final note, bow direction and the placement of slurs are vastly important and are just the tip of the iceberg. Also key to expressive playing is how you treat each note with your bow. With my students I use the analogy of Chinese, or any other Asian language that’s tonal. A given syllable can have a variety of meanings in those tongues depending on whether or not the tone is straight across, rises at the end, rises in the middle, or starts high and comes down. This has caused any amount of great embarrassment to Westerners trying to learn those languages, but if we take that concept to our fiddle playing we can enrich it immensely. Think of the space your bow travels for each note as a space in which to vary the tone of the note and to shape the feeling of the tune. This is much harder to write about than slurring and bow direction, so I’ll leave you to experiment with it on your own.

Happy practicing.