Brendan O'Sullivan and Irish Fiddle

July 16, 2007 at 07:45 PM · I've never heard of this fiddler before, but I was intrigued so I tried to look him up. Unfortunately I can't find much of anything online except a little note on this website. (Click on his name and there's a little bio).

I wish I knew more about Irish fiddling specifically . . . I've usually done more Scottish/Cape Breton style. However, they are fairly similar, so maybe you'd like to try some tunes from those genres. One of my favorite fiddling books is Aly Bain: 50 Fiddle Solos. It has lots of great classics are really fun to play, but not too complicated. Another good one is Natalie MacMaster's Cape Breton Island Fiddle. Good luck! :)

July 17, 2007 at 01:18 PM · Hi Karen, not sure exactly how to answer your questions, but a good place to get started learning about Irish fiddle is here:

http://www.irishfiddle.com/welcome.html

I've never heard of Brendan O'Sullivan, but there are many clips on that site of fine fiddlers for you to listen to. It also has a page on the different regional fiddling styles, although the styles aren't as distinct as they once were due to modern technology and travel. Viola is not a commonly found traditional instrument, by the way, and you'll have a hard time finding recordings of it, but it can fit into the music, *if* the player has a feel for the music and how it's played.

If you really want to play Irish fiddle, I would advise listening to as many traditional players as possible and familiarizing yourself with the tunes and the style that way. You won't learn it from books---much of the rhythms and the ornamentation can't be notated, and even if it were, it would be unwieldy and unreadable. Hornpipes are not supposed to be played as fast as possible, for example. They have a certain swing to them (this is dance music) and those dotted quarter notes you see in the book are only the skeleton of the tune, meant to be played differently each time around, sometimes with grace notes, sometimes with slides, sometimes straight, all according to your taste. The more you listen, the more you'll know what you like, and what is appropriate, and you can build it from there. Good luck!

July 17, 2007 at 01:42 PM · Thanks Shailee. The book has a CD with it and listening to that helps, although even listening to it I still don't really care for these hornpipes, they're still kind of, I don't know, boring. ("as fast as possible" for me is not really all that fast . . . it was more the energy, for lack of a better term, in the pieces that I was thinking of in the viola book, than the actual metronome marking). On the other hand, the slides and polkas in this book really came alive on the CD in a way they never would from the notation. I like O'Sullivan's playing style, so that's why I wanted to find out more about him (from his bio, it sounds like we have at least one thing in common, we both like Guinness ;-)

I played classical violin first, before viola, and so theoretically would be happy to play the fiddle tunes on the violin instead, except that my violin is really not a very good instrument and I can't afford a new one :( Whereas I just bought a new viola that I love to play.

It seems like there are different schools of thought for fiddling on the viola. My "Fiddling for Viola" book just transposed everything down a fifth and had it written out both ways, in treble and alto clefs. I assume the arranger picked tunes that he thought would lend themselves well to that treatment. As for these, some of them do, some of them don't.

July 17, 2007 at 08:49 PM · Transposed them down a fifth? Sheesh. You'll be playing a tune, but you won't be able to play with anyone else because everyone will be playing in a different key! At least if you learned the tunes by ear and played them down an octave, you could find playing partners.

With your classical background, though, I suppose you could shift and find the higher notes that way, but I really wonder if the tunes would sound the same. So often you have "figure eight" string changes going back and forth between strings---some people call it "bow rocking" and it takes advantage of where the notes fall on the strings on the violin in first position, it might be a lot harder to play them higher on the neck. And then the viola has a totally different sound than a violin, and the bow is heavier, I imagine it would be a much different experience trying to play fiddle tunes on it. At least the fast tunes. The slower ones wouldn't be a problem.

In addition to listening, I recommend finding a live fiddler to watch (and teach you, if you can find someone willing). You're in Massachusetts and there are plenty of Irish sessions there---try looking on www.thesession.org for listings.

July 18, 2007 at 03:41 AM · Unfortunately, I can't actually learn a piece by ear. I wouldn't even know where to start. I know some people can do this--it's a real gift, one that I don't possess.

One thing I like about this book is that it does write out some of the ornamentations and has a short section explaining them at the beginning. Reading through that has helped me understand what I'm listening to.

July 18, 2007 at 04:18 AM · Wait, wasn't he Oliver O'North's attorney back in the 80s?

July 18, 2007 at 04:32 AM · "Unfortunately, I can't actually learn a piece by ear. I wouldn't even know where to start. I know some people can do this--it's a real gift, one that I don't possess. "

That is complete hogwash. Listen to a measure of something, sing it (hum it), then play it. Repeat with the next couple of measures. Then play all three measures until they're memorized. Then continue.

July 18, 2007 at 11:02 AM · Well, I wouldn't call it hogwash, but I do disagree that it's a gift. It's a skill that can be learned, but it takes practice, like any other skill. Start with Happy Birthday. Play it in two keys. You can do that, I promise. Then play a Christmas carol or some other song you know inside out. Give it a whole practice session, then try it again the next day. You might have forgotten some notes, but I think you'll be surprised at how much you remember. The key is knowing the tune, hearing it in your head---you're not memorizing, you're playing music you already know.

July 18, 2007 at 11:41 AM · Well, I can listen to something and hum it, or sing it back, at least a few measures. But I can't get to the next step and play it on the violin or viola unless I know what the notes are. I don't have absolute pitch. I think my relative pitch is okay in that I can hear and identify intervals if they are played slowly and repeatedly, but it's pretty laborious. It's definitely not anything like automatic.

I know ear training would help with this, but I don't have that much time and I find it pretty frustrating (and boring). I didn't learn violin by the Suzuki method, and I'm not really sure I could have. My daughter had a similar experience--the playing by ear wasn't working for her.

Maybe I shouldn't say it's a gift, exactly, because I do believe that even I would improve (albeit slowly and painfully) with practice, but I also think that different people learn better in different ways. Some people learn better in the auditory mode more, some are more visual, some are tactile, some are synesthetes. Judging from experience, it seems to be hard for me to learn almost anything using auditory input alone. I also have ADD, but I don't know if that has anything to do with it or not.

My goals with fiddling are pretty modest at the moment. Mainly they are about finding tunes to play for busking and personal enjoyment. With so many excellent authentic, traditional Irish fiddlers already playing and performing, I don't think the world needs me to try to be another one. I'm not Irish, either, so I think that true cultural authenticity would be especially dificult for me to achieve and maybe not that rewarding. But I do really enjoy listening to some of the music, and playing some of the music I've been exposed to. And when I busked earlier this month, I found that at least some people in the audience seemed to enjoy hearing me play fiddle music, so I'd like to try to expand that repertoire.

As far as ear training goes, that's definitely something to put on my list to look for in a teacher. I haven't had any previous teachers who emphasized that or did much with it.

July 18, 2007 at 06:00 PM · Karen it doesn't take any ear training. It doesn't matter how long it takes you to find the note.

July 18, 2007 at 11:16 PM · Jim: perhaps you might consider ear training.

July 18, 2007 at 11:55 PM · Well Joe, it will get faster with experience.

July 18, 2007 at 11:41 PM · So I just tried the Happy Birthday exercise. It was informative (except I had to put up with my daughter asking me, repeatedly, whose birthday it was). It's easy to play it in several different keys if you just start on different open strings. Instead of going DD1D32, DD1DA3..., you can do GG1G32.. (or if it's a viola, CC1C32 ...). But starting on a finger is hard. Or at least I thought so. 112143...oops, bleah, it has to be a high 3. And so forth. I apparently still have a default half step between 2 and 3 that my fingers prefer to do.

I end up thinking about it tactilely and visually, half steps being when fingers touch each other, whole steps not. It seems like it's a good way to think about many different finger patterns, like in Gerle's book on How to Practice the Violin.

But it still seems like it's a long way from there to being able to learn a whole fiddle tune by ear. Especially when they go by so (relatively) fast on the CD.

July 19, 2007 at 01:11 AM · Karen, I told you you could do it! You should be very proud of yourself! I find it's interesting learning by ear, because not only do I have to know the tune very well in my head and listen carefully to the sounds coming out of the fiddle, but also I learn about where the notes are in relation to each other on the fingerboard and what kind of patterns come out with each tune---where each tune "lives" on the strings. And that's exactly what you're describing with the whole step/half step situation.

The nice thing about Irish fiddle tunes is that they're all in first position (no guessing about positions and finger placement) and most of them follow a certain set of patterns that repeat---lots of arpeggios and broken thirds and that kind of thing---so if you have good relative pitch (which you say you do), you can figure out one or two patterns as they recur in the tune and there you have it. And the more tunes you learn, the more patterns become familiar to you, and the easier it gets.

So start slow. Learn the easy slow tunes first. Don't try to play anything you can't hum to yourself. Try Somewhere Over The Rainbow (I might actually try that tonight, it's been running in my head for some reason). I'm firmly convinced that the most important thing needed for learning music is that you love it, and you sound like you do. So you're most of the way there already!

July 21, 2007 at 09:02 PM · well, learning tunes by ear is as much a learned skill as reading music, except it gets a lot easier a lot quicker. Find a tune you like and paly it over and over until you can sing it. Then try and play the first emasure. PLay until you have it, then go on. Learn the whoile A part and get it under your belt before you learn the B part. It really is not that hard once you start.

As far as being Irish to be able to play Irish music authentically..well that is hogwash. Do you have to be Italian to play Vivaldi or Corelli?

What you DO need, though is to listen to as many great Irish fiddlers as possible. You cannot write down on music what is being done. Start with Paddy Canny or John Doherty.

And Scottish style of playing and the Irish style, and Cape Breton fiddling are no where close. Scottish and cape Breton may be slighlty related in that they share some tunes, but the Northeast Scottish style of a Strathspey is no where near the driving force of a Cape Breton strathspey. ANd Ireland and Scotland share some tunes too, mostly from the Donegal workers going to Scotland in the summer to work, and coming back in the winter. But the style is real distinctive. Even in County Clare, in Ireland, there are differences in style from the East County to the West.