Brendan Taaffe: Ornamentation in Irish Music




Ornamentation in Irish Music

A caveat, to begin: playing a fiddle tune from written music is an act of translation, even without any ornamentation involved. Though all of the eighth notes look the same on the page, a traditional player will add some swing to bring the tune to life—a little lengthening and emphasis here, shorter there. That swing is what will distinguish a fiddle tune from a classical rendition of the piece, and the amount, placement, and uniformity of the swing is what distinguishes one fiddler from another. Hardly controversial ground, but it’s a good place to begin talking about ornamentation in Irish music, because lifting that from the page is an even bigger piece of translation, and the execution of ornaments varies greatly from player to player.

We’ll start with trebles and cuts, working with the traditional reel Within a Mile of Dublin. In m. 2 and 3 I’ve put a treble, or triplet, to replace the opening figure in m.1. In my usual playing of the tune, I would have a treble in the opening measure of the tune as well, but I want to make the point early that ornaments are not essential, even though they do dress the tune up pretty. You hear the terms treble and triplet used interchangeably, but I’m calling it a treble here because it doesn’t consist of three notes of equal length. It’s more a question of tension and release. When I first teach a treble, I have my students slur the preceding two eighth notes and then bring the bow to a tense and gritty stop on the first note of the ornament, bearing down into the string. That’s the tension: the rest of it is allowing your wrist to relax and shake through the next two notes. The first note is short, the third one longer: so much so that you’ll sometimes see the ornament written as two sixteenths followed by an eighth.

Some people are down-bow treblers, others up, a select few go both ways with alacrity. I start mine on a down-bow and am working on improving the up-bow trebles. I find the down-bow to be a bit grittier, while an up-bow treble expresses the notes more cleanly. In either case, I find I have more success in the upper third of the bow—not coincidentally where most Irish fiddling takes place. By all means, though, you should practice your trebles in every part of the bow to gain control. After bedeviling yourself trying to pull them off at the frog, being at the tip will seem like a reward. I do think there’s something to be said for focusing your energy on one direction first until you’ve gained a reasonable amount of confidence with the ornament, and then to challenge yourself to be able to go both ways.

A cut is a left hand ornament, notated as a grace note. But where a grace note is melodic, a cut is a rhythmic event. It comes from the pipes, and the challenge of making sense out of a melody when you’re presented with a continuous air flow. When there are repeated notes in the melody, as in the first measure of the B part of the tune, a piper would cut between those two notes with another finger to keep them from sounding like one quarter note. Even though fiddlers can distinguish those notes by changing bow direction, it gives a different feel to the tune to slur across them and break them up with a cut. I use my third finger to cut both the first and second fingers because it can move in a faster arc than the second finger. On the third finger you’re left with no alternative but to use your pinky. With the finger that’s being cut staying down, I execute the ornament by flicking my finger across the string. Across, not up and down as if I were playing the note, because it creates a quicker and more rhythmic sound.

In the first and fifth measures of the B part, I’ve put cuts between the two D’s. These fall on the off-beat, which is a common place to find the ornament. But in the penultimate measure, I’ve put a cut ahead of the F#, which falls on the beat. This gives that notes a different emphasis, and illustrates the point that a cut doesn’t always have to fall between two notes of the same value.

Lastly, some philosophizing. I often use the analogy of a Christmas tree when speaking of ornaments in a tune. The tree itself, as the tune, is a beautiful thing, especially a balsam fir with an inch of fresh snow on its boughs in November. When we add ornaments, we can bring out different aspects of its beauty and be led to see the whole in a new way: but if you get carried away you can’t see anything but the ornaments, and lose the beauty of the tree. An image, hopefully, to keep you all from becoming too ornate.

Happy practicing.