i've been happily reading along here for quite some time and have found that many of my questions about the music get answered just by listening [reading] other folks comments. but here's something i haven't seen discuused, or maybe i missed it. there ar reels that have eight bars in each part, usually repeated. then there are reels with half as many bars, usually repeated. there are of course the ones that don't repeat in both groups. when i play at dances we stick with the longer ones because they fit the dances.my question then is, do the shorter ones have a name that separates them from the longer ones? do they go with different dances? i seek enlightenment. thanks!
A double jig is what is commonly refered to as a jig. A single jig is the same as a slide. I don't know of any diference beside the time signature, which is 6/8 in jigs and 12/8 in slides.
Double jigs are called double jigs or treble jigs not because of their time signature, but because a dancer "doubles" or "trebles" (two terms meaning the same thing as a "shuffle" or "rally") to them in their hard shoes. They are written in 6/8, but it's important to remember that when you assign a meter to Irish music, you're sort of trying to fit a rather squarish round peg into that round hole.
I was once told by someone who should know that technically a single jig is NOT the same as a slide, but the subject was not further explored as we were all fairly drunk at the time. However, in PRACTICE, the single jig is played the same as the slide. You will see them both notated in 12/8 or sometimes 6/8.
Shannon Heaton once demonstrated that you could take one jig and play it as a jig or a single/slide just by changing up the emphasis. By this, I rather inferred that its a fairly fluid concept in Irish traditional music, but that inference could be incorrect.
Um, I should probably mention that there's always a great deal of confusion over the dancer's names for the dances and the musician's names for the types of tunes.
For a musician, the dancer's light jig and double/treble jigs are all jigs, it's just a matter of speed. The light jig is played faster (usually about 112 to 120) and the double/treble jigs are slower (anywhere from 68 - ! - to 100) depending on how good the dancer is. The better the dancer, the more likely s/he'll want a slower speed, weirdly enough, because they'll want to get in fancier moves that need a slower speed.
I wasn't correcting you, Max, just corroborating! Essentially, that's exactly it -- single jigs are played as slides. Double jigs and light jigs ARE jigs, but those are the dancers' names for it, not the players.
Liz Doherty (writing in Fintan Vallely's Companion to Irish Traditional Music) says a single jig is different from a double jig in that the single jig rhythm is predominantly a "crotchet followed by a quaver." In Americanese, that's a quartere note followed by an eighth note. A slide, Liz says, is essentially a fast single jig. Either can be written in either 6/8 or 12/8.
The entry on reels doesn't say much beyond what Zina already posted above.
The lexicon of formal music doesn't always lend itself to Irish music, and the musicians themselves apparently didn't bother talking about 4 bar reels versus 8 bar single reels enough to warrant coining a specific word for it. Works for me.
I've only ever heard the short reels referred to as 4-bar reels. A single reel has a slightly different rythm to a normal reel (which I've never heard referred to as double). Brighton Camp is a single reel although it is often played as a polka.
With double jigs and single jigs I've always though of it as the number of quavers played after the first note in each beat. A single jig is crochet-quaver, crochet-quaver etc. while a double jig is quaver-quaver-quaver,quaver-quaver-quaver etc.This is not the same terminology as a dancer uses. A single jig would normally be notated as 6/8. I think a slide is rhythmically more complex and sounds as if it has 4 beats to a bar which is why it's notated as 12/8.
Yep, Paul, to me the phrases in a slide are longer than a single jigs. But Breathnach said the tune ending distinguished a slide from a single jig--slides end on two dotted crotchets.
I'm not so sure I agree on the rhythmic difference between single and double reels. Some single reels are often played double (AABB). And some single reels aren't a 4-bar repeating pattern, but a true 8-bar phrase played only once (ABAB). Some single reels are more march-like, but some roll and flow just like most double reels.
My understanding is that single and double reels are distinguished solely on how many times each part is played (ABAB vs. AABB), but single and double jigs are distinguished by whether quavers predominate (double jig) or a pattern of crotchets and quavers does (single jig). Of course, that raises the question of what you call a single jig with the crotchets filled in. Take 'Off She Goes' for example:
| F2 A G2 B | ABc d2 A |
can be played
| FAA GBB | ABc dAG |
Is it still a single jig?
Definitions for reels relate to length (ie the 8 bars in each part of a single reel are not repeated) but the tune is normally played either 3 or 4 times (double reels are normally played 2 or 3 times). Examples of this type of reel are Rolling in the Ryegrass, Boyne Hunt, Red Haired Lass, Drowsie Maggie, Glass of Beer, etc.
Comment continued (work interruption!!)....
As has already been stated the situation with jigs is different in that the double and single refer to the rhythm. While the 12/8 one can be confusing (single jig or slide?) I always find it easiest to think of an example. In fact I can't think of many single jigs apart from Off She Goes (all dance competition goers will be very familiar with this!) and Smash the Windows. As for slides, there's no shortage amongst all those great Sliabh Luachra tunes.
Just to confuse matters even more, I glean from Irish dancers in Leeds, that "heavy jigs" are not jigs at all - they are hornpipes.
I only found this out by getting her to sing me one!
There's a bit of a mystery surrounding single jigs - and indeed slides - that I have never seen explained to my satisfaction, or at all, so if anybody could shed light on the matter I'd be very grateful.
Certain tunes from the piping tradition especially are called single jigs but the way they are habitually played they become practically indistinguishable from a reel played at a moderate tempo.
Some examples are
- The Long Note (which is in fact very close to Séamus Ennis' setting of the reel Jenny's Welcome). This sounds so much like a reel that for example K Burke recorded it in a set with The Macroom Lasses and that other tune (Rough Molly?)
- The Ballintore Fancy (or whatever that classic Bothy Band tune is really called) which you can find in Ceol Rinnce na hÉireann Vol 1 among the single jigs, no. 3 if I remember correctly
- Pat Ward's jig, from Ennis, which is played as a reel, The Doon, practically unaltered
Other single jgs seem to hang onto their "jiggishness" better - Dinny Delaney's, Ask My Father, etc.
I'm aware of course that a crotchet-quaver rhythm is very close to the uneven swing of pairs of quavers in a reel or hornpipe... but did these tunes stop being used for dancing and become "pieces" at some point, or what happened?
Something similar seems to happen to slides. There seem to be two schools of playing them. In one they sound very strongly 12/8 - as in the playing of Micho Russell, Michael Tubridy and the Chieftains in general. Then you hear them played by Jackie Daly and co., Matt Cranitch and co., Séamus Begley and co. and they sound much more like hornpipes. It's not just a matter of the speed, either. It's a totallly different phrasing and feel.
What gives? Do dancers in different regions require a different beat? Playing for some sets recently I was asked for slides and decided to try out the Daly-hornpipe-feel variety. The dancers were completely flummoxed. I started again with a familiar 12/8 tune and all was well...
I just scanned the first three volumes of CRE and didn't find Ballintore Fancy in any of them, as a reel, single jig, or slide. Ihave a hard time imagining it as anything but a steady reel, a la Bothy Band. Perhaps you mean a different tune?
To demonstrate the difference between a single and a double jig, the chieftains made a nice recording: On "Water from the well", first track, they play the slip jig "drops of brandy" as single Jig, double jig, rell and slip jig. I would say, that Will's explanation is correct.
To the first questions regarding the reels: I never heart different names for reels with four or eight bars, but I found, that scottish reels mostly have four bars for each part (i.e. Kerr's collections), irish reels mostly eight. Is it the question how the music fits to the dances?
Here you go Will, it's in Vol. 2, No. 66 - and here are the notes as translated by Paul de Grae on Nigel Gatherer's site:
66. Port Sheáin Pléamonn: John Fleming's Jig [called Kiss in the Furze in "The Dance Music of Willie Clancy"], from Jack Wade [pipes], Clones, County Monaghan, X, 1967. Fleming was a piper who died about 1940 in Dublin.
Just to add further fuel to the debate, I notice that in Vol 2. Breathnach classes "single reels" as a kind of polka - there is a section "[POLKAS, SINGLE REELS, ETC.]". Reels whether they have 16 or 32 bars etc., seem to be reels "tout court" and not single reels, in Breathnach's definition.
So I'm looking at # 66 in Vol. II and it certainly is the same basic melody as Ballintore Fancy, but the rhythm is definitely a slide. If you played it in 12/8 against Ballintore Fancy as a reel, you'd quickly get out of sync. The slide version holds on quarter notes where the reel does not.
This strikes me as the sort of tune morphing that happens when someone half learns a tune and then reconstructs it later, but it comes out in a different meter or key. Or when someone deliberately takes a tune they like and noodles around to see how it fits as another type of tune.
I've also wondered about the polk/reel relationship, because Irish polkas are typically played fairly straight compared to Lawrence Welk polkas, and it isn't that much of a stretch to twist a polka into a reel.
Will, so the music says "slide" to your eyes, while the familiar Bothy Band rendition says "slow reel" to your ears. That is exactly my point: there seems to be a class of tunes that are called single jigs but which are played in a way that is very close to a slow reel or hornpipe.
The Long Note is probably a better example: it is invariably referred to as a single jig, but I'd bet you've never heard it played like one.
I was hoping someone had come across an explanation.
Steve, what I'm saying is that when I write out what the Bothy Band is playing for Ballintore Fancy, it's definitely in 4/4, and if I played #66 in CRE, as notated there, it would definitely sound like a slide (in 12/8). In other words, the meter is plainly different, and so the phrases of the two tunes, though very similar, would not mesh if played together.
The opening bar says it all. As a slide, CRE has it:
|G2 B BAB G2 B d2 B|
and as a reel, the Bothy Band does:
|G~B3 GBdB|
The difference is clear (to my ear at least) if you hang on those quarter notes in the slide as long as they deserve--just shy of a dotted quarter, which shortens the following eighth notes to something less than an eighth (but more than a 16th).
And played over top one another, you'd be trying to fit the 12 note bar of the slide into the 8 note bar of the reel. It doesn't work, even though the melody is essentially the same.
In other words, to play these back to back--say the slide first, and then the reel--you'd have to make a conscious change in rhythm to do them each justice.
Technically, being in 12/8, a single jig has just as much in common (being counted 1234, albeit in groups of three) with a reel as a jig. But we don't necessarily feel them the way it's written... At least the way it's played for dancers. The most famous single jig in the world, by the way, is Pop Goes the Weasel.
As regards to meter, often whoever was writing them down hadn't a clue what the "proper" (if you can use that word in relation to this stuff) meter would have been, technically speaking, and just used the approximate meter that made it easiest to write the thing down.
Geoff, I'd take the "heavy jig" hornpipe with a grain of salt, as many, if not most, stepdancers call "heavy jigs" the same as "double" or "treble jigs" -- heavy simply means you're wearing your heavy, or hard, shoes rather than your ghillies.
Oh, and the Long Note is the same situation--the same basic melody played either as a slide/single jig or as a reel. Yes, the sequence of pitches is essentially the same, but the meter is not. We have both versions here in the tune archives.
In short, when someone announces they're going to play the Long Note, you have to listen to discern whether they're playing it as a reel or a slide if you want to join in. Road to Lisdoonvarna is also widely played as either a slide or a reel.
I've also heard people take reels and turn them into slip jigs, and vice versa. I think this is a natural extension of the music--take a melody you like and experiment with how it sounds in different meters.
Zina, you're telling me that dancers count slides "1234 1234 1234"???
I don't count when I play (heh, I can barely chew gum and play at the same time--counting would completely throw me , but when I do count--when teaching a tune, say, I count slides as "123 123 123 123", and it usually comes out more like: "12 3123 12 312 3" or some other grouping of quarters and eighths.
No wonder its the dancers who are always off.... *grin*
I understand what you're saying Will but I remain neither entirely convinced nor satisfied!
The idea that "so and so is playing tune x it as a single jig and so and so is playing it as a slow reel" appears logical but I can't entirely buy it... Why?
For one thing I have yet to hear anyone play the Long Note in a rhythm that you would expect from a tune in 12/8, even those (e.g. Paddy Glackin) who describe it as a single jig in their sleeve notes. (I'd be interested if you can point me in the direction of a recording by a good trad. musician where it _is_ played in single-jig fashion.) The same goes, I would argue, for the tune we are calling The Ballintore Fancy.
Does your argument work with Pat Ward's Jig? The way Ennis plays it, it could be construed as sounding jiggy - but you only need to speed it up, without changing anything else about it, and you have De Dannan thrashing out The Doon!
I think I need to consult some heavyweights from the world of pipering. If I get any answers or more information about these particular tunes and single jigs in general, I'll post it here.
Then there is the separate but to my mind related business of the two different ways of playing slides that I alluded to in my original post. For elucidation about this I think I'll have to find someone playing in the Cork/Kerry dance scene.
Looking forward to hearing the results of your investigations--Matt Cranitch would be a good one to consult. Try his web site (for Sliabh Notes) for an email address.
Hello there, nice to see such a friendly seeming bunch of folks out there.
Would you say this question of definition boils down to how much swing a person puts on a tune?
BTW Will, speaking of number-mashing, someone once tried to teach me Scott Skinner's so-called 'brilliant' finish to the Marquis of Huntley's delight as a series of triplets (and it wasn't a wind up), when it's actually played as quadrepets (sp?) - I was very confused until one day I listened very carefully to Tommy People's version and the penny dropped.
reels, the long and short of it.....
reels, the long and short of it.....
i've been happily reading along here for quite some time and have found that many of my questions about the music get answered just by listening [reading] other folks comments. but here's something i haven't seen discuused, or maybe i missed it. there ar reels that have eight bars in each part, usually repeated. then there are reels with half as many bars, usually repeated. there are of course the ones that don't repeat in both groups. when i play at dances we stick with the longer ones because they fit the dances.my question then is, do the shorter ones have a name that separates them from the longer ones? do they go with different dances? i seek enlightenment. thanks!
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Dont
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
The double, or common, reel is an 8 measure part that is repeated (for two total iterations).
The single reel is an 8 measure part that is not repeated (for one iteration).
I've always just figured that the 4 measure part that is repeated is essentially a single reel, but I've never asked, so I don't really know either.
Zina
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
o.k., that seems simple enough. is this the same method for determining double and single jigs also?
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Dont
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
A double jig is what is commonly refered to as a jig. A single jig is the same as a slide. I don't know of any diference beside the time signature, which is 6/8 in jigs and 12/8 in slides.
-Max
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Max Becher
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Double jigs are called double jigs or treble jigs not because of their time signature, but because a dancer "doubles" or "trebles" (two terms meaning the same thing as a "shuffle" or "rally") to them in their hard shoes. They are written in 6/8, but it's important to remember that when you assign a meter to Irish music, you're sort of trying to fit a rather squarish round peg into that round hole.
I was once told by someone who should know that technically a single jig is NOT the same as a slide, but the subject was not further explored as we were all fairly drunk at the time. However, in PRACTICE, the single jig is played the same as the slide. You will see them both notated in 12/8 or sometimes 6/8.
Shannon Heaton once demonstrated that you could take one jig and play it as a jig or a single/slide just by changing up the emphasis. By this, I rather inferred that its a fairly fluid concept in Irish traditional music, but that inference could be incorrect.
This probably doesn't help you much, does it?
Zina
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Zina Lee
Um, I should probably mention that there's always a great deal of confusion over the dancer's names for the dances and the musician's names for the types of tunes.
For a musician, the dancer's light jig and double/treble jigs are all jigs, it's just a matter of speed. The light jig is played faster (usually about 112 to 120) and the double/treble jigs are slower (anywhere from 68 - ! - to 100) depending on how good the dancer is. The better the dancer, the more likely s/he'll want a slower speed, weirdly enough, because they'll want to get in fancier moves that need a slower speed.
And then of course there's set dances and sets.
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Thanks for correcting me Zina. That was just something I read somewhere, can't really remeber where, about jigs and slides.
-Max
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Max Becher
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
I wasn't correcting you, Max, just corroborating! Essentially, that's exactly it -- single jigs are played as slides. Double jigs and light jigs ARE jigs, but those are the dancers' names for it, not the players.
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
i thank you all for this moment of enlightenment. now i'm off for a brisk snooze to digest it all.
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Dont
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Liz Doherty (writing in Fintan Vallely's Companion to Irish Traditional Music) says a single jig is different from a double jig in that the single jig rhythm is predominantly a "crotchet followed by a quaver." In Americanese, that's a quartere note followed by an eighth note. A slide, Liz says, is essentially a fast single jig. Either can be written in either 6/8 or 12/8.
The entry on reels doesn't say much beyond what Zina already posted above.
The lexicon of formal music doesn't always lend itself to Irish music, and the musicians themselves apparently didn't bother talking about 4 bar reels versus 8 bar single reels enough to warrant coining a specific word for it. Works for me.
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Will CPT
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
I've only ever heard the short reels referred to as 4-bar reels. A single reel has a slightly different rythm to a normal reel (which I've never heard referred to as double). Brighton Camp is a single reel although it is often played as a polka.
With double jigs and single jigs I've always though of it as the number of quavers played after the first note in each beat. A single jig is crochet-quaver, crochet-quaver etc. while a double jig is quaver-quaver-quaver,quaver-quaver-quaver etc.This is not the same terminology as a dancer uses. A single jig would normally be notated as 6/8. I think a slide is rhythmically more complex and sounds as if it has 4 beats to a bar which is why it's notated as 12/8.
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Paul_draper
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Yep, Paul, to me the phrases in a slide are longer than a single jigs. But Breathnach said the tune ending distinguished a slide from a single jig--slides end on two dotted crotchets.
I'm not so sure I agree on the rhythmic difference between single and double reels. Some single reels are often played double (AABB). And some single reels aren't a 4-bar repeating pattern, but a true 8-bar phrase played only once (ABAB). Some single reels are more march-like, but some roll and flow just like most double reels.
My understanding is that single and double reels are distinguished solely on how many times each part is played (ABAB vs. AABB), but single and double jigs are distinguished by whether quavers predominate (double jig) or a pattern of crotchets and quavers does (single jig). Of course, that raises the question of what you call a single jig with the crotchets filled in. Take 'Off She Goes' for example:
| F2 A G2 B | ABc d2 A |
can be played
| FAA GBB | ABc dAG |
Is it still a single jig?
Um, shouldn't I be working? Or sleeping?
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Will CPT
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Definitions for reels relate to length (ie the 8 bars in each part of a single reel are not repeated) but the tune is normally played either 3 or 4 times (double reels are normally played 2 or 3 times). Examples of this type of reel are Rolling in the Ryegrass, Boyne Hunt, Red Haired Lass, Drowsie Maggie, Glass of Beer, etc.
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Bannerman
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Comment continued (work interruption!!)....
As has already been stated the situation with jigs is different in that the double and single refer to the rhythm. While the 12/8 one can be confusing (single jig or slide?) I always find it easiest to think of an example. In fact I can't think of many single jigs apart from Off She Goes (all dance competition goers will be very familiar with this!) and Smash the Windows. As for slides, there's no shortage amongst all those great Sliabh Luachra tunes.
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by Bannerman
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Just to confuse matters even more, I glean from Irish dancers in Leeds, that "heavy jigs" are not jigs at all - they are hornpipes.
I only found this out by getting her to sing me one!
# Posted on December 1st 2003 by geoffwright
Single jigs etc.
There's a bit of a mystery surrounding single jigs - and indeed slides - that I have never seen explained to my satisfaction, or at all, so if anybody could shed light on the matter I'd be very grateful.
Certain tunes from the piping tradition especially are called single jigs but the way they are habitually played they become practically indistinguishable from a reel played at a moderate tempo.
Some examples are
- The Long Note (which is in fact very close to Séamus Ennis' setting of the reel Jenny's Welcome). This sounds so much like a reel that for example K Burke recorded it in a set with The Macroom Lasses and that other tune (Rough Molly?)
- The Ballintore Fancy (or whatever that classic Bothy Band tune is really called) which you can find in Ceol Rinnce na hÉireann Vol 1 among the single jigs, no. 3 if I remember correctly
- Pat Ward's jig, from Ennis, which is played as a reel, The Doon, practically unaltered
Other single jgs seem to hang onto their "jiggishness" better - Dinny Delaney's, Ask My Father, etc.
I'm aware of course that a crotchet-quaver rhythm is very close to the uneven swing of pairs of quavers in a reel or hornpipe... but did these tunes stop being used for dancing and become "pieces" at some point, or what happened?
Something similar seems to happen to slides. There seem to be two schools of playing them. In one they sound very strongly 12/8 - as in the playing of Micho Russell, Michael Tubridy and the Chieftains in general. Then you hear them played by Jackie Daly and co., Matt Cranitch and co., Séamus Begley and co. and they sound much more like hornpipes. It's not just a matter of the speed, either. It's a totallly different phrasing and feel.
What gives? Do dancers in different regions require a different beat? Playing for some sets recently I was asked for slides and decided to try out the Daly-hornpipe-feel variety. The dancers were completely flummoxed. I started again with a familiar 12/8 tune and all was well...
# Posted on December 2nd 2003 by Jeeves Tones
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
I just scanned the first three volumes of CRE and didn't find Ballintore Fancy in any of them, as a reel, single jig, or slide. Ihave a hard time imagining it as anything but a steady reel, a la Bothy Band. Perhaps you mean a different tune?
# Posted on December 2nd 2003 by Will CPT
Ballintore Fancy
It doesn't go by that name in CRE - I'll look it up when I get home this evening. I'm sure it's in Vol. 1.
# Posted on December 2nd 2003 by Jeeves Tones
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
To demonstrate the difference between a single and a double jig, the chieftains made a nice recording: On "Water from the well", first track, they play the slip jig "drops of brandy" as single Jig, double jig, rell and slip jig. I would say, that Will's explanation is correct.
To the first questions regarding the reels: I never heart different names for reels with four or eight bars, but I found, that scottish reels mostly have four bars for each part (i.e. Kerr's collections), irish reels mostly eight. Is it the question how the music fits to the dances?
# Posted on December 2nd 2003 by McFolker
Ballintore Fancy
Here you go Will, it's in Vol. 2, No. 66 - and here are the notes as translated by Paul de Grae on Nigel Gatherer's site:
66. Port Sheáin Pléamonn: John Fleming's Jig [called Kiss in the Furze in "The Dance Music of Willie Clancy"], from Jack Wade [pipes], Clones, County Monaghan, X, 1967. Fleming was a piper who died about 1940 in Dublin.
Just to add further fuel to the debate, I notice that in Vol 2. Breathnach classes "single reels" as a kind of polka - there is a section "[POLKAS, SINGLE REELS, ETC.]". Reels whether they have 16 or 32 bars etc., seem to be reels "tout court" and not single reels, in Breathnach's definition.
Any thoughts?
# Posted on December 2nd 2003 by Jeeves Tones
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
So I'm looking at # 66 in Vol. II and it certainly is the same basic melody as Ballintore Fancy, but the rhythm is definitely a slide. If you played it in 12/8 against Ballintore Fancy as a reel, you'd quickly get out of sync. The slide version holds on quarter notes where the reel does not.
This strikes me as the sort of tune morphing that happens when someone half learns a tune and then reconstructs it later, but it comes out in a different meter or key. Or when someone deliberately takes a tune they like and noodles around to see how it fits as another type of tune.
I've also wondered about the polk/reel relationship, because Irish polkas are typically played fairly straight compared to Lawrence Welk polkas, and it isn't that much of a stretch to twist a polka into a reel.
# Posted on December 2nd 2003 by Will CPT
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Will, so the music says "slide" to your eyes, while the familiar Bothy Band rendition says "slow reel" to your ears. That is exactly my point: there seems to be a class of tunes that are called single jigs but which are played in a way that is very close to a slow reel or hornpipe.
The Long Note is probably a better example: it is invariably referred to as a single jig, but I'd bet you've never heard it played like one.
I was hoping someone had come across an explanation.
# Posted on December 2nd 2003 by Jeeves Tones
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Steve, what I'm saying is that when I write out what the Bothy Band is playing for Ballintore Fancy, it's definitely in 4/4, and if I played #66 in CRE, as notated there, it would definitely sound like a slide (in 12/8). In other words, the meter is plainly different, and so the phrases of the two tunes, though very similar, would not mesh if played together.
The opening bar says it all. As a slide, CRE has it:
|G2 B BAB G2 B d2 B|
and as a reel, the Bothy Band does:
|G~B3 GBdB|
The difference is clear (to my ear at least) if you hang on those quarter notes in the slide as long as they deserve--just shy of a dotted quarter, which shortens the following eighth notes to something less than an eighth (but more than a 16th).
And played over top one another, you'd be trying to fit the 12 note bar of the slide into the 8 note bar of the reel. It doesn't work, even though the melody is essentially the same.
In other words, to play these back to back--say the slide first, and then the reel--you'd have to make a conscious change in rhythm to do them each justice.
# Posted on December 3rd 2003 by Will CPT
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Technically, being in 12/8, a single jig has just as much in common (being counted 1234, albeit in groups of three) with a reel as a jig. But we don't necessarily feel them the way it's written... At least the way it's played for dancers. The most famous single jig in the world, by the way, is Pop Goes the Weasel.
As regards to meter, often whoever was writing them down hadn't a clue what the "proper" (if you can use that word in relation to this stuff) meter would have been, technically speaking, and just used the approximate meter that made it easiest to write the thing down.
Geoff, I'd take the "heavy jig" hornpipe with a grain of salt, as many, if not most, stepdancers call "heavy jigs" the same as "double" or "treble jigs" -- heavy simply means you're wearing your heavy, or hard, shoes rather than your ghillies.
# Posted on December 3rd 2003 by Zina Lee
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Oh, and the Long Note is the same situation--the same basic melody played either as a slide/single jig or as a reel. Yes, the sequence of pitches is essentially the same, but the meter is not. We have both versions here in the tune archives.
In short, when someone announces they're going to play the Long Note, you have to listen to discern whether they're playing it as a reel or a slide if you want to join in. Road to Lisdoonvarna is also widely played as either a slide or a reel.
I've also heard people take reels and turn them into slip jigs, and vice versa. I think this is a natural extension of the music--take a melody you like and experiment with how it sounds in different meters.
# Posted on December 3rd 2003 by Will CPT
Zina, you're telling me that dancers count slides "1234 1234 1234"???
I don't count when I play (heh, I can barely chew gum and play at the same time--counting would completely throw me
, but when I do count--when teaching a tune, say, I count slides as "123 123 123 123", and it usually comes out more like: "12 3123 12 312 3" or some other grouping of quarters and eighths.
No wonder its the dancers who are always off.... *grin*
# Posted on December 3rd 2003 by Will CPT
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
I understand what you're saying Will but I remain neither entirely convinced nor satisfied!
The idea that "so and so is playing tune x it as a single jig and so and so is playing it as a slow reel" appears logical but I can't entirely buy it... Why?
For one thing I have yet to hear anyone play the Long Note in a rhythm that you would expect from a tune in 12/8, even those (e.g. Paddy Glackin) who describe it as a single jig in their sleeve notes. (I'd be interested if you can point me in the direction of a recording by a good trad. musician where it _is_ played in single-jig fashion.) The same goes, I would argue, for the tune we are calling The Ballintore Fancy.
Does your argument work with Pat Ward's Jig? The way Ennis plays it, it could be construed as sounding jiggy - but you only need to speed it up, without changing anything else about it, and you have De Dannan thrashing out The Doon!
I think I need to consult some heavyweights from the world of pipering. If I get any answers or more information about these particular tunes and single jigs in general, I'll post it here.
Then there is the separate but to my mind related business of the two different ways of playing slides that I alluded to in my original post. For elucidation about this I think I'll have to find someone playing in the Cork/Kerry dance scene.
Thanks for your musings anyway.
Cheers
S
# Posted on December 3rd 2003 by Jeeves Tones
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Looking forward to hearing the results of your investigations--Matt Cranitch would be a good one to consult. Try his web site (for Sliabh Notes) for an email address.
# Posted on December 3rd 2003 by Will CPT
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Hello there, nice to see such a friendly seeming bunch of folks out there.
Would you say this question of definition boils down to how much swing a person puts on a tune?
BTW Will, speaking of number-mashing, someone once tried to teach me Scott Skinner's so-called 'brilliant' finish to the Marquis of Huntley's delight as a series of triplets (and it wasn't a wind up), when it's actually played as quadrepets (sp?) - I was very confused until one day I listened very carefully to Tommy People's version and the penny dropped.
fuddler
# Posted on December 3rd 2003 by fuddler
Re: reels, the long and short of it.....
Actually, dancers would circumvent the entire thing by clapping on the 1st and 3rd beat of a 12/8 bar and counting just the measures.
# Posted on December 3rd 2003 by Zina Lee