Brendan Taaffe: Whelan's Bowing




Whelan's Bowing

I learned Whelan’s jig from an EP that was done by Aggie Whyte and Peadar O’Loughlin in the early seventies. Aggie Whyte was a great fiddler, and winner of the Senior All-Ireland championship in 1955, the first woman to do so. She came from Ballinakill, Co. Galway, so it’s safe to assume that the title of the jig refers to one of the Whelan’s from that town. A number of Whelans played and, with the Moloneys, formed the core of the famous Ballinakill Ceili Band. Their style was smooth and flowing, and this is a great tune for developing that sound.

The most helpful thing I’ve ever been told about bowing is the following axiom, for which I’m indebted to Randal Bays: The bow, and the bowing pattern you use, should articulate the phrasing of the tune as you hear it in your head. More commonly, as we’re learning, we let what is convenient or easy for bowing create the phrasing of the tune. That can lead us astray, and this axiom should remind us that the bow is in service of the music. In Whelan’s, as in a lot of other tunes, there are a lot of phrases where the tail note of the phrase falls on a different string: both phrases in m. 2, the first phrase in m. 4, both phrases in m. 6, etc. It’s most comfortable to change bow direction at a string change, but if we do that on those phrases, we’ll break the flow of the music. In m. 2, for example, you wouldn’t hear a break between the E and the B if you were humming the tune, and you shouldn’t hear one when you’re playing it. Strive for the illusion that your fiddle is just one long string. You can do this by having your slurs across strings be as smooth as possible, and not unintentionally accenting the note on the new string when you get there. This particular situation, the tail of the phrase on a different string, is a great place to start chiseling this axiom into your mind, and once it’s there it will have many other applications.

The little squiggly marks throughout the tune (as the one over the very first note) indicate ornamentation. When you see such a mark in a book of tunes it usually means that the editor is leaving the choice of ornamentation up to the player, or to what’s appropriate for the instrument in question. In this case, I’d like all of those ornaments to be rolls, a distinctively Irish way of going about things. More so than with anything else, you won’t be able to get the roll correctly without hearing it done, so listen carefully to your recordings. But I can try to say something that will help you interpret what’s going on. A roll is a five-note ornament: the note being ornamented, a cut above the note, the note, a tip below the note, and the note again. It is a rhythmic event, not a melodic one, and what you will want to hear, really, is the note itself three times, divided rhythmically by the ornamenting notes. For an E roll, you play the E, flick your third finger across the string to interrupt the sound, back to the E, lift the finger to the open string, and back to the E. This all happens in one bow stroke, with a lean on the first E—it is, after all, the melody note that’s being dressed up. The most common mistakes, I think, are to play all of the notes evenly (the first and last are longer than the middle three) and to miss the middle E in the hurry to get all of the notes in. It’s worth practicing slowly for some time, making sure you’ve got the rhythm of it, before incorporating the roll into a tune.

Happy practicing.