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Turning a tune inside out!

February 8, 2009 by Donna

Annie Cameron’s Jig

What happens when you’re not paying attention? When it’s a piece of music, a simple slip like misreading the key signature can uncover a whole new interpretation of the melody and the harmony underpinning it. A little key change and suddenly it’s a whole new tune!

Reading through the William Marshall Collection, I found this little slip jig and in error, I started playing it in B minor instead of it’s original Bb major. When I realized my mistake and corrected it, I thought, “Hmmmm . . . I might like the minor version better!”

So here is my minor update of a major slip jig (9/8) called Miss Ann Cameron of Balvenie. Try it out and then go back to your tunebooks and play some of those major tunes as minors instead. Who knows what you’ll find?

PDF Download of tune

Why I Play Franco-American Fiddle Music

January 27, 2009 by Donna

reprinted from Le forum, Franco American Centre, UMaine/Orono: June 1998, © Donna Hébert

As I ponder what the music I play means to me, I know that, having heard my mother’s music and seen her family’s musical house parties as a child, I would not feel settled or satisfied until I had made it a large part of my adult life

Peggy and Her Range Riders - 1938 — Peggy and Her Range Riders – 1938

My mother’s French immigrant family is very musical. While they gave up their language in an effort to assimilate and avoid discrimination, the music remained as a viable outlet for culture. Five of my her seven siblings played, as did both my maternal grandparents – fiddle, piano, tenor banjo, accordion, guitar, mandolin. My mother sang and played the tenor banjo in bands in the thirties and forties, with her sister, Theresa. Their strict father fetched them home from Boston because, “nice girls didn’t go live in the city and become musicians.” They were good pickers too, and did a lot of harmony yodeling in their act. I recall my mom trying to teach me to yodel before my voice ever broke! She played tunes on the banjo, as well as backing up songs.

So, as a child, while I didn’t play “Franco-American music,” I listened and learned technique and other musical skills. At 22, I was re-introduced to fiddle music through Dudley Laufman’s Canterbury Country Dance Orchestra, and what should I find but a re-creation (on a larger scale – not the kitchen but a town hall) of my grandmother’s kitchen soirées. I was hooked. About a third of the tunes had French names, but it wasn’t quite what I remembered.

Then, after a year or so of sitting in at Dudley’s dances, I travelled to Barre, Vermont to see a fiddle contest at the invitation of my mother’s cousin, Clem Myers, who founded the Northeast Fiddlers’ Association. When I walked in, they were setting up for a band to play. Then Louis Beaudoin of Burlington, VT sat down on the stage, started clogging with his feet and began to play with members of his family. I was transported back to my grandmother’s kitchen junkets. I knew what I wanted. And I was beginning to know who I was.

Later that year, at the French Club in Waltham, MA, I met Gerry Robichaud, an Acadian fiddler from Waltham MA, who’d come to the “Boston States” from Moncton, New Brunswick in the sixties. I heard some of my uncle’s fiddling in Gerry’s playing, which had a smoother, more rolling sound than Louis’ Québécois swing. I wanted all of it! The Acadian and the Québécois sounds made me happy, made me feel “at home” in the music. They excited me. I loved Irish and Scottish music, and New England dance tunes, but the French music made me grin like a fool, and I wanted to play it with the swing, the rhythms that came so naturally to Louis Beaudoin. With the French tunes, I was home.

I loved Louis and Gerry as people and as musicians. Both the Beaudoin and Robichaud families welcomed me into their homes. In fact, it was like going as a child to visit on Sunday, which we’d always done. We’d go take a ride and drop in on a relative. Sometimes there would be music, always someone would be playing whist or gin rummy. Everyone brought food and news and shared both. So, woven in with the food and the visits with members of the Beaudoin family each time I was there (Louis had five daughters!) was the most incredible music. “Hey Donna, you know this one?” he’d say, and be off on another great tune. I’d scramble to put down my food and drink, grab my fiddle and try to follow him.

Chanterelle & The Beaudoin Legacy at the Blackstone River Theatre, RI — Chanterelle & The Beaudoin Legacy at the Blackstone River Theatre – 2008, RI

Sometimes all I got was the rhythm of the tune as I tried to follow him through a crooked patch with extra beats. Other times I was able to play along with him in his incredibly danceable groove. What a gift that was, to be carried along by Louis’ rhythms, with his brother, Willie Beaudoin on guitar and daughter Lisa on feet and piano. Like a tidal wave, it carried me farther into the heart of the music than I ever could have come by myself. And suddenly, instead of looking at the music from the outside, I was playing from inside where all the music really was. It was as though, in an instant, I had gone from looking at a tree to being the tree. My world was forever changed.

I came back to Louis Beaudoin’s soirées whenever I could until his death. And by then, I had also recorded an album for Alcazar with Gerry Robichaud, his brother Bobby Robichaud, and Tony Parkes. Working with Gerry to prepare for this album gave me a lot of time to watch and listen to him play. His groove was different, smoother, a little faster. And his tunes were terrific! So, after a year and a half of playing with Gerry every week, his style had begun to creep into mine, which was fine by me. It’s still there in my playing, as is “le swing” that I got from Louis Beaudoin, and that old fiddling sound that I first heard in my grandmother’s kitchen.

So what does all this say about the music that I play and what it means to me? Well, I have chosen to make fiddle music, and particularly Franco-American fiddle music – its performance, documentation and transmission through teaching – my life’s work. And if this music is so essential to the lives of so many – myself, Josée Vachon, Gerry Robichaud, Joe Cormier, Louis Beaudoin, and so many others, then it is indeed vibrantly alive. The fact that young people are learning about their Franco-American cultural heritage through music, and that they are as excited about the songs, tunes and dances as I was then and still am now, reassures me that our culture lives.

Printed June 1998 in Le Forum, The Franco American Center, University of Maine at Orono

A New Year’s Resolution . . . play or practice?

January 9, 2009 by Donna

Interesting postscript to this blog about how to practice – published in 2013

Play more music – every day!

As someone who teaches and facilitates music for others on a daily basis, it’s important to look at my own music with the same critical ear and eye. A friend once asked me, “you teach a lot, but how much do you practice?” A thought-provoking question, this changed my musical landscape and brought true practice back into it.

What is practicing?

Practicing is just focused playing – you’re jamming alone with an agenda.

Choose one piece or medley to work on for each session; don’t spread yourself too thin. You might like to keep a music diary, noting the date, what you worked on, any insights and further goals for that piece. Please remember to be nice to yourself. No shame, no blame! Keep it fun and you’ll learn a lot more.

When working on something for performance or recording, I deconstruct the tune, listening to myself play the component parts, the transitions, the pitches, the tricky passages, the underlying rhythms as well as the shifts or ornaments, listening for where to put dynamics and variations. Sometimes they are all in need of help and it’s hard to know where to start first.

Rhythm is usually a good place to begin, making sure I’m locking into a groove as I play, nailing the beat each time in the same place to create a repetitive rhythm. Once that seems stable, I can listen to phrasing and pitches, flipping back and forth, listening to how a note sounds, then to how a whole phrase of notes sound. When I’m satisfied with that part, I can refocus, now on the transitions between phrases that make the tune flow smoothly into the next section.

Next I work on is the ornamentation and dynamics. Both are style-specific, like rhythm and the placement of the beat (in front of, in the middle of or behind the downbeat). Ornaments are often a combination of right and left hand movements, but some are played with only one hand or the other. It helps to identify and learn these style markers and ornaments in a particular style you might be drawn to – it makes you sound much more authentic and “in the groove” in that style.

The last part of the puzzle is finding variations. When you are able to tweak the rhythm, melody and ornaments into variations, that’s when you really KNOW the tune. Usually it comes faster when you learn the tune by ear or are OFF the page. It doesn’t have to be big variations to do the trick. Swapping out one ornament for another will often work, as will replacing an even “One-and-two-and One-and-two-and” rhythm with a syncopated 3-3-2 rhythm like “One-two-three, One-two-three, One-two”. These syncopated rhythmic variations are my favorite!

Usually the learning chronology is:

1. Rhythm – Learn bowings FIRST – they create rhythm and underpin the tune and style. Play a downbeat or offbeat accent. Place beat directly on, in front of, or after the beat, creating swing (or not) this way. Accent off-beats in 2/4 dance tunes. Jigs accent the downbeat (ONE-two-three TWO-two-three. Marches accent the one as well (ONE-two-three-four). Most waltzes accent the one and three (ONE-two-THREE, ONE-two-THREE), while Cajun waltzes accent the two (one-TWO-three, one-TWO-three).

2. Melody/Pitch – Play slowly to hear individual notes. Take none for granted. Listen to each one singly and as part of a phrase – it needs to fit both ways. Play scales and arpeggios in the tune’s key to refresh your pitch memory.

3. Phrasing & voicing – Phrasing is how rhythm is created with bowing and slurs. Change voicings by using fourth finger instead of open strings or single-string shifts instead of string changes, especially in slow tunes. Slur across the beat to create a forward-moving dance groove and a subtle form of syncopation.

4. Transitions – How phrases begin and end defines the flow of a tune. First and second endings often vary in the transition back into the phrase or forward into the next one. These subtle transition variations can cue experienced contradancers to what’s coming next.

5. Ornamentation – This adds the patina of style. Make sure your rhythm is solid in the style before adding this layer. Each style has a characteristic set of ornaments that help to define it. Irish and Scottish share some ornaments, but how they are used rhythmically ends up as the style boundary. There are also universal ornaments like 3+1 bowing that sound a little different in each style because of underlying groove or rhythm changes.

6. Dynamics & tone– Use upbows to create dynamics; starting on an upbow creates an automatic volume increase for a phrase. Irish jigs use this technique a lot. You’ll notice that tone is down the list from where it would be in a classical practice routine. Rhythm trumps tone in fast dance tunes. Slow tunes are another thing altogether – tone really counts there. To play well at any speed, practice the whole thing slowly: ornaments, dynamics, variations and all, to make sure you really have it before jumping to performance speed.

7. Variations – This starts to happen when you really know the tune and get just slightly BORED with it! We’re playing new rhythms over the melody instead of rewriting a melody as in jazz. It’s a tweak, not a whole new composition. Start by moving the ornaments around through the melody and see where they can enhance a new part of the tune. Then try syncopating rhythms under a phrase over the chords, dividing the bar in thirds instead of in half: use a 3-3-2 rhythm instead of 1-2-1-2. I find these are the two easiest ways to create variations – and they’re FUN!

Which reminds me – gotta go ~~practice~~ play some music now . . .

Christmas seal

December 25, 2008 by Donna

Waking early this Christmas morning, I am grateful for the small things. My daughter is asleep in her room. After yesterday’s rain, there will be no snow today, making our Christmas journey easier.

And at the moment, I’m in the grip of an interesting ‘earworm’. I can’t seem to shake the insistent progress of a particular fiddle tune in my head. It’s a funny, crooked, droney little thing called “Fisherman’s Song for Calling the Seals,” very Scottish indeed, appealing to my latent Celt. I learned it from an Ossian recording, “Seal’s Song”.

There are no seals to call here in Amherst, Massachusetts, but there’s something in the tune that calls to my blood. Closing my eyes, I’m in a boat off a lonely Scottish isle with a wee whistle between my lips blowing this tune to seals, hoping to see a few this Christmas Day. Fey lot, we fiddlers!

Since tunes are meant to be shared and it’s Christmas, it seemed like a nice present! Have fun opening it!

How to learn a tune by ear

December 2, 2008 by Donna

Listen repeatedly and sing along with the source, then transfer the sung phrases to the instrument. [Don’t worry if you can’t sing in tune. Your voice is helping you to punctuate the rhythm of the tune.] Go back to singing when your lose the tune – it’s best when the tune crawls into your ear and won’t leave. Sing and play. Sing and play. Play and sing. Time means nothing. Above all, don’t worry. It’ll come if you just keep listening.

When you have the notes, listen some more for rhythms and figure out the bowings that create them. Think about using the up-bow more to create subtlety, tying notes across the beat on a upbow to camouflage the movement. The upbow is your friend.

Now listen some more for harmony, chords and countermelodies. Figure out how the chords progress in this tune. Is it major or minor? A I-IV-V or Modal progression? Mine the tune for clues to harmonic movement. Then find a short line for each phrase. Try to stay on one string, visiting two at most and staying off the E string entirely for most harmony or counter lines. Often one phrase will lead you into the other, but you do need to ‘feel and find’ or actually know the chord progression. I’m a feel and find gal and learned chord names and the theory behind it later. Trying all the options lets you hear extra stuff – some of which is glorious amongst the notes you’d never play again. Aren’t you relieved now to know where the notes to avoid are located?

Now that you’ve found the chords, use them to play with rhythm. Find backup double-stop riffs that make the tune dance. Get so deep into the groove that you have to rock those rhythms with your bow. Here’s where time can really stand still, a paradox of your play with rhythm, but oh so true! Listen some more for variations and study how a small but constant varying of rhythms creates the new flavoring for the tune.

Above all, learn to love the many ways you can combine three, three and two rhythms into a bar of eight sixteenth notes. Syncopation is your friend, man! Find some great conga or djembe players and play jigs and reels while they pour those rhythms into your ears. Now THAT’s a jam session! Call me up and I’ll be there!

Raven’s Wing

December 1, 2008 by Donna

A bird, a canyon, a day of wonder and sorrow

I was traveling out west in March 2008 with fiddler Jane Rothfield and guitarist Max Cohen and we visited the Grand Canyon. It was a beautiful day, clear, glorious and and majestic, with ravens soaring overhead as we walked the trail at the canyon’s edge. It was also a sad day because my father was dying in Florida. As we left Hermit’s Rest, one raven landed in our midst. Fixing me with a beady eye, the bird whuffled its throat feathers in and out, clacked its beak and seemed to speak to me particularly. We were enthralled – I even snapped this photo.

The long moment ended; the raven took flight. Stunned, we just stood, silent and then piled into the car. Just as we left, the call came through. It was my brother and my father had passed just as the raven spoke to us. Several weeks later, in memory of my dad, Rodger E. Hinds, I wrote a slow air with Max Cohen and called it “Raven’s Wing.”

The story has even more layers. Upon hearing the about the bird and listening to the music, my mother told me about my father’s World War II airborne unit, the Ravens (301st Bombardment Group, Army Air Corps). This was new to me, as was the the photo of his insignia with three ravens on a blue background. Their newsletter is even called “The Raven.”

As the years go by, a raven often visits in the yard. Not a crow, much bigger. Not the same raven, of course, but I greet him as if we were related. Who really knows?

Max and I play this tune at the Fiddlers Summit in Shepherdstown WV in 2010.

Mother’s Day 2014: Impromptu jam on “Raven’s Wing” at La Grande Rencontre. Cathedral del Gesu, Montreal. With Bruce Molsky, Pierre Schryer, Quinn Bachand and Robin Bulliaume.