4 minute read
Encouraging a Class Musician
The single most important thing they can do in a dance class is play in time (the manual has tempo guidelines), and a close second is making the downbeats sound like downbeats (elongated, heavy, accented) and the upbeats sound like upbeats (crisp, light, short). Having a handle on that will produce danceable (if at times boring) music. Many troubling strathspeys I’ve heard have a root problem of either being played out of time (generously, with too much rubato) or confusing the beat hierarchy so that the music says up when the dancers’ feet are going down or vice versa.
Many Scottish country dances classes rely on the plethora of wonderful music that has been recorded and is available to use for classes and social evenings. Lucky and rare are those classes with musicians who play regularly for them, but sometimes class teachers are approached by musicians who would like to try to learn to play for Scottish country dancing. They may already be skilled players but have little experience of playing Scottish tunes for dance. For a teacher who does not play an instrument and is less confident about explaining the music than teaching a dance, Tim MacDonald, himself a fiddler and dancer, has a few hints about what musicians may need to understand about playing for dancing, and how to keep them happy and wanting to turn up and play at all. Here are his suggestions.
At the risk of sounding obvious, playing Scottish tunes every day on their own is very helpful. Even if it’s just a 5-minute warm-up before their ‘real’ practice on other repertoire. All the guidance in the world can’t help them if they don’t spend time playing the music, so best start now! For quality, I also recommend listening to many recordings. There’s also something to be said for having good books of Scottish tunes, never mind the explicit SCD connection. James Hunter’s The Fiddle Music of Scotland has safe choices. I personally get a lot of mileage out of old books, especially Niel Gow’s Complete Repository (four volumes) and his six Collections of Strathspey Reels (available in facsimile as a free PDF from various sources). There are dozens and dozens of modern collections and it’s hard to go wrong. If it hasn’t happened already, somebody needs to explain the math of what an 8×32 set is (or 8×40, or 6×32, or…), what the signature tune is, choosing four tunes and playing them in the order 1234 2341 to get eight repetitions (or choosing three and doing 123 123 21, or…), making sure you play 32 bars and not 16 or 48 or whatever, and how the opening bow chord and closing bow chord are supposed to work.
A lot of things after that ultimately come down to personal preference, experience, etc. There are various ways to make the beat hierarchy more interesting than a simple down-up-downup while keeping the tune danceable, but no One Way that I could helpfully write about here. Similarly, there are various approaches to ornamentation, improvisation, harmonization, and so forth. A lot of my early learning came from hearing an expert play something (an ornament, a musical effect, something short) and thinking, “That was cool, how do I do that myself?”. Nowadays I sometimes trust my brain to go, “Wouldn’t it be cool if you played …?”. I cannot tell you how many thousand mistakes (ahem, ‘blue notes’, or ‘overly creative musical ideas’) I’ve made and continue to make, but within reason I’ve found that dancers prefer to listen to someone who’s trying to be interesting and occasionally fails than somebody who’s too afraid of doing something wrong to do anything fun.
