Every now and then the topic of a post here bridges the two areas of cultural activity that have been the main focuses of this blog. This time, the link is the dedication of a recording of an Irish dance tune by the fiddler Fergal Scahill: “Here’s a tune for any fellow knitters out there, tis the knitting season after all!”
There are a few more words to it in the video and I’m passing the dedication onward a while after it was first made, but the sentiment remains the same. This rendition is used below, with other recordings of the same tune, to illustrate specific aspects of the native performance practice of Irish traditional music (ITM). This is also a well-established part of the autoharp repertoire but is usually approached from a musical perspective rooted in the US. This post calls attention to a few of the dissimilarities. It replaces an earlier one that dealt with the same issue but has been extensively revised. The title of the tune provides an apt heading for the new version.
Readers of this blog whose curiosity about the autoharp may have been piqued by its frequent mention here but are otherwise unfamiliar with it, will find an excellent introduction in an episode of the NPR program All Things Considered. It describes general perceptions of the instrument in the US, how it gained popularity there, and the genesis of an album titled Masters of Old-time Country Autoharp, which is online as a YouTube playlist. This recording illustrates the origins of the American style of autoharp playing that I have been using as a point of comparison with a speculative more idiomatically Irish style.
The initial version of this post was titled The Autoharp in Irish Music — Part 2 (now offline with its URL redirecting here). The corresponding Part 1 remains where it has been all along but has also been revised significantly in the interim and should merit (re)reading. In summary, it begins with the filmed appearance of several autoharps at a traditional music festival in Ireland, in 1967.
It then delves into a question posed by the Irish fiddler Kevin Burke — who made the first studio recording of ITM with autoharp accompaniment — about differences between the American and Irish national styles of fiddle playing. I paraphrase this as, “How could an autoharper who plays Irish tunes American style sound more like an Irish musician?” The subsequent exposition in the former Part 2 ended by noting that it might benefit from being restructured. This is the upshot and includes new recorded examples.
The one introducing this post illustrates many of the expressive devices that distinguish the Irish style of fiddle playing from the American. One is a characteristic lilt in the execution of what are regularly notated as even sequences of eighth notes. This is how the tune’s first phrase might appear in a compilation of Irish tunes intended for general use. (Despite the exaggerated example in this post’s banner image and its use in the running text, staff notation is not an essential part of the discussion.)
Another difference is the more extensive ornamentation in Irish playing, but at least one device Scahill uses is common to both national styles. It replaces an eighth note with two sixteenth notes and is termed a “treble” (or triplet) in the Irish glossary. It is usually notated as a standard bracketed triplet, shown below on the first occurrence, but played more nearly as written in all the other instances. In a treble that starts and ends on different notes, the sixteenth notes can replace either of the eighth notes. And again, lilt is not notated.
This ornament is relatively easy to play on most of the instruments in the traditional Irish line up. The autoharp’s closest relative among them is the harp. The treble is the primary decorative device heard in the following solo performance by Gráinne Hambly, taken from her 2006 album The Thorn Tree. She supports the melody with a bassline and an occasional chord, notwithstanding the harp’s ability to provide a rich chordal accompaniment throughout.
This light-handed self accompaniment is one of the things worth keeping in mind when using an autoharp to play ITM in a native manner. The next video picks the tempo up a bit, toward what dancers usually call for. Kieran Hanrahan restricts ornamentation on the banjo exclusively to trebles and never plays more than one note at a time despite the ease with which chords can be played on that instrument. Tony Linnane also plays trebles on the fiddle, together with the more elaborate “roll” discussed in detail below. Eamonn Cotter plays rolls on the flute, as well as ascending and descending trebles. (A same-note treble requires a type of articulation that traditional flutists normally avoid.)
Geraldine Cotter uses the piano for accompaniment without a hint of melodic participation. The same applies to Carl Hession’s piano playing in the next snippet.
Hughie Kennedy doesn’t play a single chord on his button accordion and only occasionally presses a bass button. This is equivalent to extraordinarily spartan use of the thumb on an autoharp, and then only to pick single bass strings. Michaela Cunningham plays a double stop on the concertina now and then, which also has a ready correlate on the autoharp. Irish accordion players commonly take the sparse-bass and no-chords approach even when playing solo.
One of the concerns in the native performance of ITM is limiting the amount of sound that might offset the clarity of the melody. There is a fair amount of artistic latitude in this but many feel that accompaniment is best forgone entirely. Self accompaniment in solo performance is a matter of individual preference, pretty much by definition. Nonetheless, there are traditional norms against which a performance on a given instrument is judged.
Unfortunately, there are none specifically for the autoharp. Anyone wishing to use that instrument for playing ITM on its own terms can only begin by adapting practices from the established traditional instruments. As already noted, the present discussion is intended to point out things to consider when plotting a course through these waters.
Another part of the task is recognizing and avoiding techniques that are second-nature in American-style performance but lie outside the ITM mainstream. For example, the piano accompaniments heard above move almost entirely in quarter notes with only an occasional passing eighth note. There is none of the shorter-note rhythmic “fill” that is otherwise commonplace on the autoharp.
Autoharpers in either the accompaniment or melodic role should be able to glean much of what they need to know about traditional Irish performance simply from listening to it. The one likely exception on the melody side is the roll. This is a sequence of five notes consisting of a principal note, an extremely rapid auxiliary note played above it, the principal note again, a fleeting auxiliary note below it, and ending with the principal note. Its execution varies significantly from instrument to instrument, with further nuance reflecting the preference of individual musicians.
Willie Clancy demonstrates it on the uilleann pipes in the following recording. He plays the “cut-and-tip” variant (aka cut and tap, strike, or pat), so-called from common labels for the upper and lower grace notes. The ornament is applied to every sequence of three same-pitch eighth notes in the tune.
Of the six rolls in the next notated example, the first two are written as played above (but normalizing the intervals between the auxiliary and principal notes), the following three are indicated with signs commonly used for all variants, and the last is the “triplet roll” explained in the following video workshop.
Janet Harbison discusses traditional Irish ornamentation on the harp. She uses the cut, treble, and rolls heard above, and adds a “run” to them. Its arpeggiated form is, in fact, what the autoharp was built for. The other ornaments are also practicable on it with about the same relative degree of ease (or difficulty) as on the harp. The core demonstration of them takes eight minutes from the linked point of entry into the video. The full presentation includes an equally worthwhile discussion of self accompaniment.
Of these ornaments, the treble and arpeggiated run are the only ones that can be played on an autoharp without “open noting” — i.e., raising a bar to make damped strings available for plucking without changing the chord. They are therefore equally accessible regardless of the player’s familiarity with that technique, or how the instrument is strung and tuned. In contrast, a bar needs to be raised and lowered again for a cut, glissando run, or triplet roll.
A cut-and-tip roll requires the bar to be raised and lowered twice. Harbison says that its execution on a harp is “fiendishly hard but worth the practice.” It is also difficult on the banjo and accordion but their players generally make preferential use of the treble, anyway. I now believe that the treble better suits the autoharp, as well, even if the initial version of this post suggested otherwise. More remains to be said about rolls on that instrument, nonetheless, but I’ll defer it to a separate post.