Extract from ‘Sakura Fiddles’
PC’s first Japan trip, 2008
Friday 4 April
‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ said an attractive English female voice, ‘welcome to the Shinkansen. This is the Nozomi superexpress bound for Tokyo.’
Bit of a rush, but we’d got to the station on time; I’d even given Mihumi, Humika and Tari, Tamiko’s three girls, some children’s stickers and red London Bus key-rings; and at precisely 8.53am the long-nosed bullet train pulled into the platform, steel barriers slid apart, and we took our seats. It was a smooth, comfortable ride, and the first evidence of our high speed (260 kph) was slowing to a halt at Kyoto only ten minutes after leaving Osaka. Later, as we sped past the upright girders of a bridge out in the country, the view just turned grey briefly, like a laptop screen about to time out - not the familiar flickering effect. Tamiko hadn’t slept much the night before either, and dozed across the aisle with the younger girls.
Tamiko on train
After their holiday in Kansai it would soon be back to school in Tokyo, and twelve-year-old Mihumi sat next to me with a small pink laptop device, doing her homework. I looked out of the left window at the flypast of fields, houses, tea plantations, factories, hoping to see Mount Fuji, so revered by the Japanese that (formal-is-normal) it’s known as Fuji-san. I asked Mihumi to wake me up if I dozed. In fact, whether from low cloud obscuring its famous shape, or my temporary distraction by the orange text on the end-of-coach digital display drifting from left to right in Japanese and Roman characters alternately, I still missed it. Mihumi’s eyes widened when she realised, and her hands flew up to the top of her head, but I reassured her I’d stayed awake, just hadn’t been paying attention. The English female voice announced our approach to Shinagawa Station, six kilometers south-west of central Tokyo, and there we were met on the platform by Keni-chi Fukae, our guitar player for tonight’s concert. After brief introductions Tamiko departed to take the girls home.
‘Hajime-mashi-te’
‘Hi, you can call me Ken’
We drank Asahi beers with our lunch in a Japanese restaurant at the station, and a flask of warm saké to follow. He’d been very busy around St. Patrick’s Day, Ken said, with lots of paid sessions. A fan of the Irish scene, as well as playing the music himself, he was a particular fan of Flook guitarist Ed Boyd.
‘How does he get that incredible groove?’ he asked.
‘Having John-Joe next to him on bodhran probably helps,’ I suggested.
‘No, there’s more to it than that,’ he said.
We went by cab to the YouPort hotel to drop off my suitcase, then walked to nearby Gotanda Station and took the Metro to a rehearsal space Tamiko had booked near Sangubashi Station. Ken quizzed me on my favourite Irish fiddle players as we held on to the ceiling straps in the crowded carriage. At last we sat down in a rehearsal room Tamiko had booked in the former (1964) Olympic Village, now the National Olympics Memorial Youth Center, and played through the entire concert set. Once or twice I suggested simpler chords, with fewer ninths, but on the whole I was happy for Ken to do his progressive Irish thing. Then Tamiko arrived and introduced her friend Mihoko Sasaki, who had created the ‘Pete Cooper Official Japanese Website’. She would be joining us on concertina, I was surprised to learn, on the English tunes. Fine, OK then.
Keni-chi Fukae, Irish-style guitarist
By the time we’d run through the relevant pieces again I felt drowsy, and lay down with my leather jacket folded as a pillow under a desk in the corner for a cat nap on the floor - a nap brought to an end by the arrival of writer Ohshima Yutaka, who’d come to interview me before the concert. Mr Yutakaa, an affable and courteous middle-aged guy, wouldn’t have looked out of place in an English folk club, even to the grey pony-tail; he belonged to that same 1960s-70s folk revival generation. His first question was about the difference between ‘fiddle’ and ‘violin’.
‘When you play violin music, reading notes from a page, the violin is almost like a physical obstacle between you and this ideal music there on the stand - or somewhere beyond it. Always hoping to attain perfection, you use all your technique just to dominate the instrument. Whereas when the fiddler plays, it’s by heart; the music’s already inside you. The energy flow is outwards, which seems to me its natural direction; and the fiddle functions as your channel of expression. You also take responsibility for the sound you’re putting out.’
‘That’s the best answer I’ve heard to this question.’
As time was running out we continued our conversation in the taxi. Ohshima-san knew about my work with Holly and Peta in the 1970s and ’80s, and thought there were maybe ten copies of each of our LPs somewhere in Japan. He also spoke of the value of YouTube as a music resource.
Myo Nichi Kan, the gently modernist concert venue, was designed by Frank Lloyd Wright as a girls’ school, and had a medium-size wood-panelled hall.
‘Many of your grandchildren are in the audience tonight,’ smiled Tamiko, referring to her Tokyo fiddle students. At one minute to seven, the show due to begin, I was making a last-minute revision to the set-list in a kitchen/ office out the back. Tamiko popped her head round the door: ‘It’s time to start.’ I grabbed the list and followed.
Maybe it was when I was hurrying along the corridor to make my entrance that the thirty or forty people in the hall, as I learned later, felt an earthquake tremor. I didn’t feel it myself, but apparently it occurred on the dot of seven o’clock, and made the timbers creak. It was a good omen anyway perhaps, because the show went well, though ignorance of the tremor, in my case, was probably bliss. ‘Salisbury Plain’, with a C-drone on Mihoko’s concertina and Tamiko’s fiddle, was a particular hit (followed by brisk sales of The Savage Hornpipe at half time), and I noticed Mr Ohshima at the back of the hall rocking along with pleasure to Ironlegs.
Pete, Tamiko and and members of Tokyo Fiddle Club
‘That was the first time in my life I’ve heard English folk music played live,’ he said after the show and kindly gave me a CD of Okinawan singer Nami Makioka. All my remaining book/CDs had sold out, and I signed several,
‘ To - -, Happy Fiddling! Best wishes, Pete.’
A young woman, possibly a Fiddle Club grandchild, whose name I didn’t catch, gave me a beautiful box of cloth flowers, wrapped in gorgeous fabric. A small middle-aged man I’d noticed in the audience taking notes during the show greeted me with a bow, presenting a souvenir paper model of a Japanese drum and stand, with his card sellotaped to the back. Kazuyoshi Shiraishi, ‘Fan writer of folk music’, also had mint condition LP sleeves of ‘Frosty Morning’ and ‘The Heart is True’ for me to autograph (‘sign’), so I obliged. Most of the audience were leaving by now, and the caretaker wanted to close the hall. Retrieving my fiddle and bag from the back, I grabbed the set-list off the kitchen table and gave it to Kazuyoshi-san as a souvenir.
A group of friends stood waiting in the mild spring evening darkness under a canopy of cherry blossom lit by street lamps. It was good luck to catch the falling blossom, said a woman called Rie Hayashi, who spoke excellent English. She was co-translator with Tamiko of my Mel Bay book, and said she worked on foreign exchange programmes at the university. Rie reckoned that in Tokyo the best of this year’s sakura was already over. Tamiko, Mihoko, Ken and I posed for photos, then Ken had to leave. It was still only mid-evening so, saying sayonara (goodbye) to the rest, I joined Tamiko, Mihoko and her husband Maha (Atsushi Sasaki) and Rie at a Chinese restaurant nearby. Maha and Mihoko were business partners at Zen-on music publishing contemporary classical and the famous Suzuki-method books, as well as being a married couple. Tonight had been a first outing for Mihoko’s concertina, she said. She’d bought it in London, where she and Maha had been on holiday, from Hobgoblin. Maha was from Marioka City in the north of Honshu. People there have a different accent, someone said, because they avoid opening their mouths too wide in the cold weather. Maha had just purchased a shamisen, and to my alarm handed me a black felt-tip to sign its virginally white, dog-skin drum. I had to oblige. At some point I asked about the Japanese name for the ‘just-in-time’ production method I remember Nicola Gunn telling me about, and Rie said she thought it was called the ‘Kam-ban’, or Toyota, method.
We walked to the station, where Maha gave me a Suica (‘watermelon’) public transport chip-card with credit on it. Every station on the Tokyo metro has a signature sound that’s played when the train doors open. Maha pointed out that Ebisu, two stops from Gotanda, has the opening phrase of the Harry Lime theme, which an Ebisu-related brewery, Sapporo’s, also use on their beer commercials. Tamiko, who must have been exhausted, came as far as the hotel with me. I took the lift and checked into my room. There was a great jazz and world music station on the radio, and the announcer had a kind voice. I slept, with a couple of breaks, until about 6.00am.
Saturday 5 April
Tokyo view
I opened the curtains and viewed the bright, dawn-lit city from my 12th floor hotel room. ‘Yes, this feels like a proper business trip,’ I thought. I also felt vindicated in having called my modest teaching practice the London Fiddle School, perhaps a grandiose name at close quarters but one that suddenly made sense at this distance. Meeting the fan writer last night with his collection of my old records also brought a smile to my face, and I gazed out over the complex of high-rises, streets, expressways and train-lines with the sense of new possibilities.
Mihoko came to the hotel lobby at 2.00pm. She does a lot of the music transcription at Zen-on, and also (frightening thought) leads a Melodica Orchestra. Tamiko arrived a few minutes later, and we talked about her Complete Irish Fiddle Player translation. Under hot sun and blue sky we walked briskly to Gotanda; climbing the stairs to the platform, Mihoko showed me her wristwatch, the divisions on its face made not by numerals but a circle of 5ths. We got out near the famous Meiji-Jingu shrine, the streets outside crowded with shoppers and sightseers. The museum was closed but after calling at a gift shop, where I bought Sue a fan, we made our way to the grounds of the shrine, and strolled under an imposing timber Toro into the welcome shade of tall, well-established trees.
entrance to Meiji-Jingu
When Emperor Meiji brought his court from Kyoto to Tokyo in 1868 he adopted western dress, and developed a taste for Bordeaux wine, too; a formidable stack of empty barrels of which was displayed beside the main path. As we walked on under the trees something in the atmosphere evoked memories of my earliest trips to France, the feeling of being abroad for the first time, and really enjoying it. A traditional (shinto?) wedding was being conducted near the shrine, not a common sight apparently, and the two women, fascinated, stopped to watch.
At the shrine itself, after tossing a coin offering into the slatted wooden box, I made a bow and clapped twice to alert the kami, and made my wish.
Meiji-Jingu shrine
We visited a ceramics exhibition and left the park by a different route, to emerge near Sangubashi station. We had time for tea and cakes, my treat, in a charming 1920s artist-style cafe before crossing the railway bridge to the Olympics Memorial Youth Center for my Tokyo Fiddle Club workshop at 6.00pm.
About half the participants were relative beginners. In two and a half hours I taught The Dusty Miller (English 3/2 and Irish 9/8 versions) and some relaxation exercises; then, for the benefit of those more seriously into Irish fiddling, Jenny’s Chickens.
Tokyo Fiddle Club
I had my photo taken with various individuals, and took some myself, before we all retired to a nearby burger restaurant. A member of the Fiddle Club worked there as a waitress - most surprised when we all turned up. After burgers and fries and a pitcher of beer we had a session, Tamiko joining me for the East Tennessee Blues, then Mihoko too for Ironlegs, a great favourite in this neck of the woods. Later, Tatsuya Suzuki, a bio-statistician who’d attended conferences in Oxford and Cambridge and wore fashionably retro, round-framed glasses, accompanied me as far as Gotanda station, along with his non-English speaking girlfriend.
Sunday 6 April
I slept from past midnight until half past three, then lay awake worrying about finding my way to Narita airport on Monday morning. I read for a while and eventually slept again. I had confused dreams, one featuring a giant nipple, another, possibly prompted by Suzuki-san’s retro, 1940s-style glasses, reminded me of old Japanese films, but woke at 7.30 feeling OK and turned on the radio. A male singer with an incredibly deep voice, grave and gravelly, at times half strangled, at others vibrato-laden, uttered a long sequence of seven-syllable lines, and was joined at one point by a second basso profundo. Was this some kind of ritual music? Or from a Noh play? I could have listened for hours, but decided to tackle my travel anxiety head-on, by making a practice run. After breakfast of coffee and buns round the corner from the YouPort I walked to Gotanda station, took the train to Shinagawa, and located the precise departure platform (thirteen) for Narita. It was easy, especially on a quiet Sunday morning. Greatly relieved, I took photos on the way back of girls in knee-length black socks.
Tamiko arrived at one o’clock and we took the Metro to my final gig, a workshop for the Tokyo branch of the Comhaltas Ceoltoiri Eireann (CCE Japan), which took place in a medium-size hall in a modern building, with two dozen participants.
Workshop Participants CCE Japan
I noticed there was one knee-socked girl in the group, but concentrated on teaching some of the tunes I’d learned from Co. Galway ‘fireside fiddler’ Lucy Farr - Ballyhoura Mountains, Lucy Farr’s Polka, and Music on the Wind. At the refreshments break the helpers managed to relay my tape of ‘Heart and Home’ through the house system, which had overhead speakers concealed in the ceiling panels. This led to the curious sight of some of the keener students, devices set to ‘record’, rushing to hold their mics up to the ceiling at various points around the room. If you’d arrived late, just walked in and seen only their slowly waving, outstretched arms reaching up, and the collective look of rapt attention on their faces, you could have been forgiven for thinking it was some kind of Lucy Farr spirit cult we were starting here.
By the end of the afternoon Tamiko had sold the last remaining copies of my CDs and presented me with a cheque in pounds sterling. She also surprised me with the news that we could go to see a Kabuki theatre show. I’d expressed my curiosity a few days before, remembering how enthusiastically Michael Spencer spoke of a Kabuki-related education project he was involved in during the time we worked on Wigmore Hall Fiddle Days. It seemed that even without pre-booking you could turn up and probably get a seat. Tamiko, Rie, Suzuki-san and I decided to try. There was an issue with the train tickets, something to do with switching between lines, but eventually we emerged from Higashi-ginza station onto Harumi Street, east of the Imperial Palace in the glitzy Ginza district. Ginza, according to my Rough Guide, was laid out on a strict grid pattern by Victorian architect Thomas Waters, and became a centre for business in foreign wares, and thus western modernity. ‘The height of sophistication in the 1930s was simply to stroll around Ginza, and the practice still continues, particularly on Sunday afternoons...’
Kabuki-za theatre
The splendid Kabuki-za theatre stood near the station, the building a 1950s replica of the 1925 original. The six o’clock show had sold out before we reached the front of the queue, but we decided to wait for the next performance and passed the hour standing, or sitting on our fiddle cases, in line. Suzuki-san could play the banjo, he said, as well as fiddle, and often went to the USA. When I asked if he knew John Herrmann his eyes widened, and lit up with pleasure; he said that he had met him. Rie and Tamiko quizzed me on the precise meaning of various phrases in the Mel Bay book, fine-tuning their translation. Tamiko also gave me a folder of music examples she uses for teaching beginners.
We finally got into the seven o’clock show, ‘Ukare Shinju’ (The Happy Love Suicide), and climbed a steep, red-carpeted staircase to the fourth floor, where we took our seats.
‘Based on a novel by contemporary writer Inoue Hisashi,’ said the programme note, ‘this is a parody of all serious love suicide plays and finally ends with the main characters flying through the air on their way to the underworld. Full of thrills and comedy, with popular star Kanzaburo making a rare flight through the theater.’
I found the play hard to follow in detail, even with an English language ear-piece, but it seemed to be about an ambitious young novelist seeking publicity for his work, first by marrying a girl of lower class, the daughter of a bookshop-owner, then attempting to fake their double suicide. Something went wrong, though, and he was killed by mistake. Lulled by the warmth of the theatre I nodded off during several scenes, so exactly how this occurred, and what became of his wife, remained a mystery. The lead character however was eventually carried to paradise on the back of a giant mouse (how else?), his friend shouting up to him, as he rose from the stage by means of a harness and cables, that sales of his novel had now rocketed with the news of his death. The writer continued his final ascent, casting confetti and handfuls of streamers, until he came more or less level with those of us on the 4th floor and then disappeared somewhere to our left.
Tatsuya-san had to get home, but Tamiko, Rie and I took a stroll through night-time Ginza, rather a long one before we could find an affordable, mid-price restaurant. We sat down at a traditional sunken-floor table for a last meal together. I ate a lot of raw fish and drank Japanese dark beer. The ladies’ conversation seemed at one point to be a Japanese equivalent of 1980s astrology (‘What’s your sun sign?’), as they discussed blood groups and various personality characteristics associated with them. This was all new to me. I said farewell to Tamiko, and gave her my heartfelt thanks for the brilliantly well-organised tour. Rie kept me company as far as my stop on the Yamanote line.
Monday 7 April
Starbucks for breakfast. It’s a beautiful morning in Tokyo. Maybe Rie’s right; sakura’s over, and the hot summer weather’s coming. I talk to a local retired engineer, Masato Mori, who presents his business card: Gotanda Machinery. The train carriage to Shinagawa is stuffed with rush-hour commuters, everybody on hanging straps, the seats all folded away, our dense human mass swaying like a tide with every jolt or sideways lurch of the carriage. By 8.37 I am waiting on platform 13. The Express duly departs at 8.49, and arrives safely at Narita, terminal 2. I check my bags in and wander around the duty-free mall, buying cigarettes for Nigel, and changing Japanese cash into sterling. Japan Air flight JL401 departs at noon.
Funnily enough, I get the same plenty-of-leg-room seat as on the flight out, but with two Korean girls as neighbours, students making their first visits to London and Paris. I watch the video ‘Atonement’, then about half of an action movie, ‘I am Legend’, which turns out to be rubbish. After a long flight I reach Heathrow, deeply knackered, and take the Piccadilly Line tube to Finsbury Park station, and a cab up to Astra House.
- Pete Cooper © 2008/ 2010
Unison and Harmony in Irish, Scottish and English Fiddle
This article first appeared in 2006 as ‘Cooper’s Fiddle Corner’
in FiddleOn magazine
When two or more instruments play the same notes at the same time, they are playing in unison, and that, broadly speaking, is the way Irish traditional musicians play in sessions. The sound of unison fiddling, often heard in Donegal, for example, is rich, subtle and compelling, with or without other instruments, especially when all the players are listening to the collective, as well as individual, musical effect. It’s an approach often adopted by Scottish, English and other fiddlers as well, but let’s stick with the Irish for now. Whatever the combination of fiddles, flutes, whistles, concertinas, uilleann pipes, button accordions, banjos, mandolins etc., these instruments all play the tune, maybe with bodhran or bones adding rhythm. A chord structure may be implied, it’s true, by the odd pipe drone, or melodeon left-hand, but the music, when played in this manner, is essentially monophonic.
To be strictly truthful, slight differences in ornamentation or bowing (breathing, tonguing etc) between one player and another inevitably give rise to a pleasing near-unison effect known as heterophony. Everyone, in other words, plays the same thing, more or less. For this reason, ‘unison’ fiddles create a very different sound from the violins of an orchestral, or pop, string section, in which bowing is marked on the score and precisely followed, with identical phrasing and dynamics. Traditional fiddlers do not usually blend together in such a smooth fashion, but manage to hold on to a sense of their own individuality within the unison.
A closely related style of ensemble fiddling is playing in octaves. In standard violin tuning, GDAE, any tune that’s played entirely on the top two strings (or, more accurately, doesn’t go below the third-finger G on the D-string) can also be played an octave lower, on the bottom strings, though obviously with different fingering. For example, one player may start The Gravel Walks on the open A-string, while the second starts it an octave lower with a first finger on the G-string. The art of playing down the octave, almost standard practice in Donegal fiddling, is known there as reversing the tune, and the combined sound perhaps recalls the higher and lower voices of women and men singing together. I remember Con McGinley praising fellow Donegal fiddler Dermot McLaughlin, for his skill in reversing.
‘But surely, Con,’ I said, ‘there are some tunes that nobody can play an octave lower. It’s impossible. There just aren’t the notes on the fiddle.’
‘Well,’ replied Con, unpersuaded, ‘Dermot can.’
Denis Murphy and Julia Clifford, in south-west Ireland, often played in octaves, while fiddlers in parts of Sweden also favour this approach, which they call grovt och grant, literally ‘rough and smooth’. American Old Time fiddlers too, especially when using AEAE, or ‘cross’-tuning, alternate easily between upper and lower octaves on many tunes, and without any change of fingering, since the top and bottom pairs of strings are tuned the same.
How, historically, did these unison and octave playing styles arise? There was, of course, in Ireland a strong tradition of solo playing, so they were a natural enough extension. The tunes themselves, simple or complex, were the basic currency of what was for centuries an aurally transmitted rural music. Few country players could read music, and audio recording only developed in the 1920s. Since the musical economy of the whole sub-culture depended on keeping the tunes in good working order, they were, I suppose, like coins of the realm, not casually to be defaced, clipped or obscured. This is why, in most sessions today, the tune itself takes precedence over chords or harmonies. It’s also why, when someone starts a tune you don’t know, the usual etiquette is still to sit and listen to it, savouring it, instead of immediately trying to join in. As Trevor Buck suggested, however, in the last issue, it all depends on what kind of Irish session it is, and faking your way through a jig to lend moral support to an unconfident player may on occasion be the decent thing to do.
So everyone plays just the tune? This will sound like nonsense to most guitarists, or anyone whose only exposure to Irish music has been listening to recent bands, in concert or on albums. The fact is that the ‘traditional Irish’ sound has tended to be reinvented at least once every decade. Piano and/ or guitar, for example, had become a standard part of ceilidh band line-ups by the mid-twentieth century, providing rhythm and chords, and not necessarily playing the tune at all. Many dance bands in the 1950s featured piano accordion, all too often played with what, to an ensuing 1960s generation, sounded like a somewhat heavy-handed use of the chord buttons. (So much so that it took the sensitivity and musical grace of a Karen Tweed to restore the instrument’s ‘trad’ credibility in the ’90s.) Johnny Moynihan is credited with bringing the bouzouki into Irish music. The original Greek instrument soon took on protective celtic colouration by evolving into, or merging with, the cittern, which instrument makers were reviving at the time. DADGAD and other open guitar tunings also entered the fray at this time, allowing the guitarist to convey the modal, drone-based aspect of the music, while also playing a full, or skeletal, melody line; a musical role similar to that of the frailed 5-string banjo in Appalachian Old Time music. In Donal Lunny’s hands the bouzouki, brilliantly played thus, along with archaic keyboard instrument, the clavinet, contributed to the Bothy Band’s driving and distinctive 1975 sound, backing a frontline of fiddle, flute, uilleann pipes or vocals, the latter, however, all still played (and sung) in a purely ‘traditional’ manner. As performance styles have continued to change over the years it’s apparent that Irish tunes are not, as some hardcore purists may argue, intrinsically resistant to being arranged and harmonised. It’s just that any consensus as to how best, and most convincingly, to achieve this is conditional and temporary. Throughout it all, however, the fiddler’s role has by and large remained stable, that of playing the tune.
Now, ‘playing the tune’ is obviously a gross understatement of what we’re hearing when we listen to top players like Tommy Peoples, Kevin Burke, Frankie Gavin, Liz Carroll, Martin Hayes, Brian Rooney, John Carty etc. Solo performance, though, is at the very root of this music, and these great soloists inherit a richly expressive fiddle language that’s evolved over centuries, adapting it to their own purposes. Scottish fiddle players are also well endowed with highly evolved bowing devices, left-hand ornaments and other aspects of style. Much of this intricate work affects the half-listener at best only subliminally, but any serious would-be Scottish or Irish fiddler will appreciate the detail.
Even an established fiddle style, however, is not immune to the influence of a changed performance context. In Cape Breton, for example, the Gaelic-speaking community preserved their music and songs at informal house-parties throughout the nineteenth century, but, as Liz Doherty has pointed out, a change of fiddle style occurred in the twentieth, probably in response to the increasingly busy piano accompaniment that gradually became standard. The complex, pipes-influenced ornamentation, use of drones and of notes outside the diatonic scales began to be dropped from the fiddle, in favour of greater melodic clarity, forward drive and strong tone in the playing of Angus Chisholm (1908-1979) and Winston ‘Scotty’ Fitzgerald. A parallel change took place around the same time (1940s) in the evolution of bluegrass fiddling from Old Time dance music, the mountain fiddle’s rhythmic functions increasingly taken over by backing instruments in a concert setting. With its intriguing and complex bow work, Old Time fiddling has been compared to a horse and buggy driving down a bumpy road, while the bluegrass fiddle soloist speeds ahead like a freight train.
And what, finally, of English fiddle? Many of the tunes are plainer in terms of their melodic line than their Irish and Scottish cousins, and without profuse ornamentation. They derive historically from a different performance tradition. While the Irish rural dance musician of the early 1800s was often an itinerant solo piper or fiddler, many fiddlers in England, especially those who belonged to the settled rural class of tradesmen, artisans, and tenant farmers, played in village bands much like those that Thomas Hardy describes in his Wessex novels, along with clarinets, flutes and cellos (‘bass-viols’) etc. The musicians who played for dances, or trooped round the village to perform carols on Christmas Eve, also played in church on Sundays, and constituted the parish ‘quire’. The bands’ dual function, sacred and secular, inevitably influenced their playing style. Long familiar with the harmonies, counter-melodies and bass lines of West Gallery church music, it would come naturally to them, when playing by heart at country balls, to improvise ‘parts’ in the heat of the moment. Their twentieth-century descendants, able rural fiddlers like Fred Pidgeon (1880-1970) in Devon, and Norfolk’s Walter Bulwer (1888-1968), did much the same, making up ‘seconds’ when they felt like it. The relative simplicity of some (though by no means all) English tunes does not arise from deficiency in melodic invention, it seems to me, but is the very thing that makes them so perfect for improvisation.
- Pete Cooper © 2006
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