Mari Black Workshop Recap

Mari Black presented a concert set of tunes to a full house at November’s gathering. Featuring both a lyrical (Calum’s Road) and a dancing strathspey (Laird of Drumblair), followed by an up-tempo reel (Marquis of Tullbardine), Mari dove right in with her usual energy, and had us all playing the complete set together.

Then she gave us a lesson on the Scotch Snap, using the vocables ‘Tum ti ‘ to indicate a dotted 1/8th followed by a 1/16th, while the opposite, ‘ti Tum’ represented the snap. She demonstrated how fiddles could use a hooked bowing to get a ‘swinging’ bow arm when playing a series of ‘Tum ti’s’ such as are found in the ‘Laird of Drumblair’. Turning her attention to the ‘chording’ rhythm players she explained how to interpret her chord indications on the notation. With Dan Faiella helping on guitar, Mari demonstrated the different effect of playing the ‘right’ chords, and then the ‘‘walking down’ or ‘walking up’ chord substitutions. Back to the string melody players, she showed how to keep the momentum of the first tune going between the 4th and 5th measure (similarly between the 8th and 9th), by inserting a low A quarter note or triplet pickup to help reset the bowing. She explained how to build in these arrangements to give the audience interesting moments during the performance.

Because these are all dance tunes, we were coerced into skipping around the room while she played, varying the tempo to drive in the point that not only is the pace important, but that dancers also need to hear ‘lift’ in the music. How to get the lift is a matter of generating the sort of ‘hang time’ experienced in a roller coaster ride when you leave your stomach behind.

The salient point of the workshop was how different playing in an ensemble must be compared to all just playing the same tune in a session. One’s ear must be attuned to the sound of the group, and not just to playing all the notes correctly for yourself. An ensemble player must listen and help out, adding where needed, and leaving out to avoid muddying the sound. And both melody and rhythm players need to work together and follow the rules set out in whatever arrangement is agreed on.

Click here to see Mari’s tunes. Click here to hear us playing the set