Style
Compared to classical violin, Irish fiddler tend to make little use of vibrato except for slow airs, and even then it is used relatively sparingly. Like the rest of Irish traditional music tradition, melodies are embellished through forms of ornamentation, such as rolls, trebles, and cuts.
Irish fiddlers also use a vocabulary of bow slurs different from other fiddle traditions, at least in proportion of usage. Most notably, fiddlers often slur into the beat to produce a certain lilt, not unlike the Newcastle hornpipe style of bowing in England and Scotland, though the technique in Ireland is not restricted to hornpipes. They may also slur over beats in such a pattern as to create a natural back-beat in reels.
Slow airs are occasionally played upon the fiddle, but the style is best known for fast, snappy reels and jigs. Strathspeys, popular in Scottish Fiddle are seldom played, as such, but there are some tunes which amply utilized dotted rhythm. Some tunes are:
- The Wind That Shakes The Barley
- The Humours Of Lissadell
- The Maid Behind The Bar
Read more about this topic: Irish Fiddle
Famous quotes containing the word style:
“Style is the dress of thoughts; and let them be ever so just, if your style is homely, coarse, and vulgar, they will appear to as much disadvantage, and be as ill received, as your person, though ever so well-proportioned, would if dressed in rags, dirt, and tatters.”
—Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl Chesterfield (1694–1773)
“His style is eminently colloquial, and no wonder it is strange to meet with in a book. It is not literary or classical; it has not the music of poetry, nor the pomp of philosophy, but the rhythms and cadences of conversation endlessly repeated.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Always, however brutal an age may actually have been, its style transmits its music only.”
—André Malraux (1901–1976)