How fast should jigs and reels be played

[gentlemanpiper]

would it not be true to say that players settle on a tempo that suits their temperament and way of playing, and that there's no point in trying to dictate how fast tunes should be played? I've seen Paddy Keenan play at blistering, superhuman speed without his playing being deleteriously affected. I'm not sure if individuals choose to play at any particular speed or in any particular style - I think that to some extent people sometimes just play the way they can

[Borderpiper]

The whole joy of music is that there is freedom of expression, without this playing stops being art and start becoming automation. You can put your own feeling into a jig, reel or what ever. The subtle differences can be heard and played to give a great rendition of the tune and it can still be in time and traditional.

The question at the start of the thread was "How fast should they be played on the pipes?" I'm sorry but I missed the "for dancing" part of this question.

I agree that having a standard set of tempos is a good idea for dancing and for players to have something to aim for but the idea of having to keep everything strictly to a set tempo is stupid.

What ever you are playing play it at a speed that keeps the tune clear and that people can play and dance to, if they want to play and dance. Always think of the tune and make sure you are playing the phrasing at a constant speed. As for an exact speed that's only for competitions and thats not where you do the majority of your playing, no matter who you are.

[leremarkable]

Within any category of dance tune type, one tune will not have the same ideal inherent speed for a particular piper and their own style as another.

This becomes immediately apparent when you attempt to join tunes which are not familiar to you as having being played as a set together before - they will not necessarily work with each other just because they are reels.

For my style, I have to be very careful which tunes I put together. If I don't, I tend to ruin a second or third tune which needs to be played more carefully or more briskly.

David

[Uilliam]

[quote="Borderpiper"]The whole joy of music is that there is freedom of expression, without this playing stops being art and start becoming automation. You can put your own feeling into a jig, reel or what ever. The subtle differences can be heard and played to give a great rendition of the tune and it can still be in time and traditional.

The question at the start of the thread was "How fast should they be played on the pipes?" I'm sorry but I missed the "for dancing" part of this question.

I agree that having a standard set of tempos is a good idea for dancing and for players to have something to aim for but the idea of having to keep everything strictly to a set tempo is stupid. [quote]

Nobody was or has been saying that ye can't put your own feeling into the music.
The pipes were the major instrument along with the harp for dances in Ireland superceded later(much later )by the fiddle accordion et al...
The music in Ireland was for the dance,be it wake marriage or hooly.
Thats how it was ..simple fact,are ye with me so far because ye seemed to have wandered off in your contribution...
In order to dance ye need tempo,thats why Ceol Rince(dance music)nEireann(of Ireland)note not of Scotland or Timbuktu gave the tempos for the various most common dances in use in Ireland at the time.
In order to become a proficient player on the Uilleann Pipes and recognised as such by your peers ye have to know the difference between the tempos and more importantly be able to play them.
Ye can do what ye like after that.
ye sound as though you are doing it the other way round to me!!
So please don't go around saying something is STUPID just cos ye don't agree with it..that is supreme arrogance,remember everything is there for a reason and don't forget the correllation between dance and music/pipes in Ireland may not be the same as ye are blasting away on yer Borderpipes or whatever in Glasgow.
How come we have not met up? As I said on an earlier thread we have a class in St.Rochs school Royston on a tuesday night term time,why don't ye stick your neck in I won't snap it,promise!
As for all ye other exponents of the mystical musing on the pipes to your own freedom of expression thingymajig,ermm.... do whatever ye like!But do remember that when ye started on the pipes ye accepted as fact that ye had to hold the set a certain way and finger it to get the notes a certain way(freedom of expression?)So it follows that if ye are playing the pipes the way they are meant to be played then ye will have tempos to guide ye along(freedom of expression?)
I am getting really quite bored with this repeating the obvious,are ye all thick or what??
Slan go foill
Happy All Fools Day
Liam

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

The pipes were the major instrument along with the harp for dances in Ireland superceded later(much later )by the fiddle accordion et al...

The harp was never used for dancing, according to Breathnach et al. The use of the fiddle predates the Union pipes, although not the Piob Mor. Do your homework.
Play at a slow tempo, even if it is your aspiration to play fast eventually. Robbie Hannon started out playing at a very lazy tempo, before speeding up. You have to walk before you can run.

[leremarkable]

In Sean Nos dancing, the dancer often requests a specific tune such as Miss McLeods Reel of the musician, and will dance that tune with their feet, to a more or lesser degree, depending on the level of their skill as a dancer. It is incredible to watch, and can on occasion display great interaction between dancer, musician and tune.

LeR

[brianc]

The hours of sitting practicing plus the free Guinness in the pub sessions aren't kind to the waistline...

- Michael Eskin

..............

What's this about FREE Guinness?

[eskin]

Yep, you come to my session on Tuesday nights, and you can have all the Guinness you want free, all night...

There, now, will you come visit us in San Diego?



M

[Royce]

would it not be true to say that players settle on a tempo that suits their temperament and way of playing, and that there's no point in trying to dictate how fast tunes should be played? I've seen Paddy Keenan play at blistering, superhuman speed without his playing being deleteriously affected. I'm not sure if individuals choose to play at any particular speed or in any particular style - I think that to some extent people sometimes just play the way they can

I was less than an hour ago sitting at the end of his bass drone, listening to him play a set of fast reels, which I ticked off at 128 bpm, as he tapped it on the floor. That's half-timing it of course, tapping on 1 and 3 only, so it would be 256 bpm in 4/4.

That was pretty fast.

Royce

[Uilliam]

The pipes were the major instrument along with the harp for dances in Ireland superceded later(much later )by the fiddle accordion et al...

The harp was never used for dancing, according to Breathnach et al. The use of the fiddle predates the Union pipes, although not the Piob Mor. Do your homework.

Kevin that is simply not true!!At the time of the introduction of waltzes to Ireland the catholic church thinking the dance too intimate decreed from every pulpit in Ireland the the pipes were the devils instrument and should be banned, almost overnight the fiddle became the instrument to have and as time went on the affordability and availability of the fiddle ensured its dominance and the decline of the pipes.Note it was the pipes and not the fiddle that was banned the Irish pipes were the favoured instrument in Ireland long before the fiddle sneaked in.As for Breathnach[ ET AL] (who might they be?)the argument is more about what the Irish harp sounded like as no one really knows,there are plenty of pictures showing harps being played at dances.....

Slan Agut
Liam

[Borderpiper]

So please don't go around saying something is STUPID just cos ye don't agree with it..that is supreme arrogance,remember everything is there for a reason and don't forget the correllation between dance and music/pipes in Ireland may not be the same as ye are blasting away on yer Borderpipes or whatever in Glasgow.

No not arrogance but temperance. I was agreeing that a set tempo is good as a guide but just a guide. Maybe that statement is all I should of said as it might have caused less confusion.I started off danced and played the bagpipes, and I still have my highland dancing qualifications (I'll bring them along some Tuesday ) I've also step danced too. I know this may not qualify me to comment on Irish music and dancing but I do appreciate the link between dancing and music.

My main instrument is the penny whistle though and the majority of the tunes I play are either Scottish puirts (songs for dancing), reels, jigs and their Irish counterparts. You can play too fast and you can play too slow but the only thing that matters is that you play it clearly that's all I am saying. Saying that you must stick to a certain speed is the point of contention I have. All the limits and boundaries on this music may help preserve it in an exacting state but it that what you want to do?

Do you want where you play and teach to be a home of Irish music or where Irish music lives?


BTW I thought dynamite was for blasting


Disclamer: Please take everything I say with a pinch of salt as I have a habit of voicing a veiw that may or may not be mine just to get people to better qualify their responses

[Kevin L. Rietmann]

Breathnach quoted a 17th or 16th century source, with the unforgettable name of Richard Head (Butthead's great²³ uncle?), "In every field a fiddle, and the lasses footing it until they are all of a foam." He also compared the sound to a "key scraping on a gridiron." The Pastoral pipes were an 18th century invention, unless you buy Grattan Flood's nonsense about Shakespeare mentioning them in the Merchant of Venice.
The old harpers played airs, descriptive pieces, O'Carolan's music, and certain types of program music, accompanying the poets and such. These are the truly old harpers, that Bunting collected music from. Their tradition basically died out in the days before the famine. I can't recollect much of any reference to their playing for dancing; certainly it would have to be soft shoe stuff in drawing rooms, and for only a couple or two. For sure they couldn't play for big group dances like the Rince Fada and the like, and indeed the old harpers considered themselves the elite of musicians, above playing for commoners.
Reg Hall in his liner notes for "Round the House and Mind the Dresser" lumps the waltz in with all the non-native dances that swamped the country in the late 19th, the mazurka, varsovienna, barndance, and so on. He says the waltz had a currency in Irish ballroom dancing (or wherever it was done) before making its way to country cabins. Buy this CD, it's great, and read what Reg has to say, he knows his stuff front and back.

[Royce]

Royce, Royce, Royce.... sigh... so I count my reels in groups of 4 notes instead of two, that counts as an "egocentric" way of notating tempos and I'm lazy...

You must be a very interesting fellow in person.


M

Just the sort of egocentric response I'd expect. You, you you, it's always about you. As far as you're concerned.

Fact is, you never even wondered that you could be comfortable throwing out a bpm less than half the speed quoted by authoritative sources or other players and even other players in this forum, and even suspect that your were talking an entirely different time base. Keen to argue your point, but entirely clueless to the fact that you were hardly as far off as the figures being thrown back and forth suggested. That by nature is egocentric.

The most telling part of your sarcasm of course is the fact that if, as you claim, you're counting all four beats in 4/4, you're doing exactly as I said you should do in order to come up with the proper bpm for an Irish reel notated in 4/4. What I actually said apparently suggests that you are *not* one of the lazy ones, 180 degrees to the opposite of your rebuttal.

Or perhaps, you are claiming to count a proper 4/4 measure, and still come up with a speed of 90 bpm. In which case, you aren't a lazy counter, just a lazy player. That's a New Orleans funeral procession on it's way to the gravesite.

It is also possible that you actually think you're counting out quarter notes but you're really only counting out every other one, and though you're thinking one, two, three, four, you're really spreading that over two measures. If so, this would not only be physically lazy, but intellectually lazy as well.

But my main point addressed the differences between notating and thus counting out bpm between Scottish lowland and Scottish Highland or GHB customs and Irish traditional notation and customs. So again, any reference to laziness really had little to do with you personally, which, since you take such great personal exception, is by definition egocentric on your part.

And more to the point, you no doubt count jigs out in 4/4 rather than 6/8 for instance, because it's harder to count out the full beat in each measure, two groups of 1/8th notes, than it is to drop into left, right, left, right march meter counting only the beginning note in each group. That by definition is lazy, and throws a different "metric accent" or "groove" or "pulse" into the genre, simply by virtue of the fact that you as a player aren't able or willing to put as much effort in hammering out the basic rhythm of the piece as would a dancer or good drummer. (If there is such a thing as the latter...) You force an accent on note 1 and 4 constantly, where the dance or the tune itself may want to bring out syncopated emphasis on beat 1 and 3 IE: X0X000 X0X000 (two measures in 6/8 time) as opposed to the inevitably forced and deadpan X00X00 X00X00 you get when you count only the easily tapped out left, right, left, right sort of beats that fall on one and four.

Going back to reel, a dancer counts two groups of 4 1/8th notes every measure. Not all beats are always tapped or stepped, but all beats are present to be measured and used. Of those 8, if you're only counting out two of them, that by definition is lazy. You're doing a fraction of the work a dancer or drummer is doing in terms of hammering out or even thinking out the basic beat. All I've suggested is that counting out at least four of those 8, every downbeat, which would be counting a full bar in 4/4, not shortcutting it into 2/2, which again, tends to impose a loping, constipated emphasis or a left, right, left, right, march structure into a reel. Even more than a jig, the reel presents opportunities to swing emphasis onto upnotes for a light, flat-out, straight-ahead, syncopated powerhouse of a feel. If you're physically counting in 4/4, and at least mentally noting every upbeat as you raise your foot to tap, or even if not physically tapping at all, you naturally fall into clean, somtimes blinding speed for free because you are thinking, counting and playing a reel the way it is being danced.

If you want to argue that you like the 2/2 emphasis, and you only play reels in that style, the Cape Breton, Shetland, or even more pointed Scottish style, then go ahead and count them like that. But you won't get a flat-out Irish reel going that way, and that is also why some people simply can't fathom how some other people can play so "fast." It isn't just "fast," it's a particular way of counting out, thinking out, playing out, and "expressing" a melodic line that naturally falls into this blinding speed in a way very similar to the same tune wanting to "dance" at a particular speed.

I know you're a fantastic piper and a wonderful human being, you can count and play any way you want, but haven't you just gone well out of your way to invite unnecessary hostility here, when, as I say, it has has very little to do with you at all?

Royce

(And I am a pretty damned interesting guy. Thanks.)

[Douglas]

My old pipe instructor (Highland Pipes) used to complain about the demanding dancers who would always try to tell him, the musician, what speed to play at, he would say "time me" and he would play it exactly to time, which was never quick enough for the dancers. This being said, he would always say it was most important to "put the music in the music". This doesn't always come out the exact way it was written.

Granted you should be aware of the timing standards but they should be used more as a guide than a rule.

[djm]

This is putting the cart before the horse. If you agree to play for the dancers, you must then play for the dancers, not for yourself. The piper may call the tune, but the dancers always set the pace, or you don't belong there.

djm