Category: Background of the Music

Mexican fiddling

Mexico has a long and varied history of musical culture, and the fiddle/violin has played an important part in this history.

One of our guest fiddlers, Osíris Ramsés Caballero Léon, comes from the Huasteca, on the east coast of Mexico, an area the Huastecans controlled for 700 years until the Aztecs moved in — only to be ousted 50 years later by the Spaniards. The traditional ensemble in Huasteca is a trio featuring the fiddle backed by complicated rhythms from treble and bass guitars — and all the musicians sing as well.

Click here to hear audio samples and learn more about the concert/workshop by Osíris Ramsés Caballero Léon.

Another part of Mexico with strong fiddle connections is in the southwest, an area called Tierra Caliente. One of our workshops allows you to learn a tune from that area. Paul Anastasio has learned from experts in that region of Mexico, and in the videos for his fiddle-online concert/workshop, he performs various tunes from there as well as teaching a popular Mexican foxtrot. Click here for details.

Mariachi music and salsa are popular in Mexico and the fiddle plays a strong role in each, though we don’t have workshops in this music as yet on the site. Mexico also has a strong history of classical violin, ranging from baroque musicians who moved there from Spain and Italy in the 17th and 18th centuries, up to more recent musicians, such as one of the world’s best solo violinists, Henryk Szeryng. He became a Mexican citizen after Mexico took in 4,000 Polish refugees from WWII in 1942. Szeryng became Mexico’s ambassador for culture, the first artist to travel on a diplomatic passport.

©2022 Ed Pearlman

Jazz fiddle on fiddle-online

The violin was an important jazz instrument among both black and white players, especially in the first half of the 20th century. The European Roma took to it and many became virtuoso jazz musicians, including the great guitarist Django Reinhardt, best known as fiddler Stephane Grappelli’s other half in the Hot Club of France.

We’re very fortunate on fiddle-online to have a detailed concert/workshop on this style of music, still called “gypsy jazz,” by one of the great exponents, Tim Kliphuis, who teaches at the conservatory of music in Amsterdam. In his online concert/workshop, he not only plays some of this great music, but also tells how he got to know and work with the Roma and gained their respect for his playing. The learning part of the workshop is very detailed, including a simple jazz tune, plus jazz riffs to practice, and a sample solo to work on. Click here for audio and details. (Note, because of the extensive detail and length of this workshop, the cost is 8 credits instead of 6. Keep in mind that as with all fiddle-online workshops, 80% goes to the artist.)

On the other side of the Atlantic, in the U.S., various styles of jazz were being developed. One of the great American jazz fiddlers was Joe Venuti, who had an adventurous, heartfelt, sometimes spare, sometimes raucous sound. Our guest Paul Anastasio took lessons with Joe Venuti back in the day, and shares with us some of his style of swing jazz fiddle, including a performance of various tunes, and the teaching of the standard “Avalon,” featuring both the basic tune and a solo improv-style version Paul composed for people to learn and develop riffs and variations. Click here for more details and signup — scroll down to Paul’s second offering for the jazz fiddle selection.

Whether it’s new to you or you’re an expert, there’s a lot to learn from these concert/workshops. Even if jazz is not your thing, try it! It expands your technical and musical abilities when you stretch toward the horizons of what jazz fiddle has to offer!

©2022 Ed Pearlman

Irish fiddling on fiddle-online

One of the most fascinating parts of learning fiddle is how it varies from culture to culture, from region to region, from player to player. People might think they know about Irish fiddling but it varies quite a bit depending on county, and ultimately on the influences of individual players from each county.

On fiddle-online, we have a number of Irish concert/workshops representing different styles, including the legendary James Kelly, Liz Knowles, Alden Robinson and Grainne Brady. We also have a Tune Group of 12 Irish tunes and many regular workshop materials — see the bottom of this message for details.James Kelly’s online concert/workshop for fiddle-online presented a style he learned from growing up in Dublin. His father was a well-known fiddler and concertina player from County Clare who played in a band that was the precursor to the Chieftains, and their family home hosted countless great Irish musicians for sessions and stories. James himself is a prominent fiddler, having hosted an Irish TV show and having toured with the legendary bands Patrick Street and Planxty. Listen to James’s performance and stories, and learn two tunes from him, a jig and a reel. Click here for audio and signup info.

Liz Knowles has performed with Riverdance, played the soundtrack for the film “Michael Collins”, played with Martin Hayes Quartet, and tours worldwide with Open the Door for Three and other groups. We’re fortunate to have materials available to you from Liz’s online workshop (this one’s only 5 credits because it’s focused on the workshop and not a mini-concert). In this workshop, Liz teaches a jig, with plenty of chances for you to learn the notes, the ornamentation, bowing, variations, and even has two variations written out for you to work with. Click here for audio and details.

Alden Robinson is an American fiddler who studied traditional music in County Cork in Ireland, does solo tours and has played with several bands, including The Press Gang. He did two workshops for fiddle-online, one including a concert, and the other focusing on the interactive workshop. Learn a great jig in the one, and learn a slide (and what a slide is) in the other. Click here for info and audio about both of these offerings.

Grainne Brady is an Irish fiddle player from County Cavan in Ireland and currently based in Glasgow where she leads sessions and plays with Top Floor Taivers, string group The Routes Quartet, and Gaeilge/Gàidhlig supergroup LAS. Her concert and the tune she teaches feature original compositions she composed for an album that illustrates an Irish novel about a young woman who travels from Donegal to Scotland 100 years ago in search of a better life, and has to come to grips with many realities. Click here for audio and info.

Many other Irish tunes are available to you on fiddle-online via Ed’s workshop videos and our unique interactive sheet music, with self-repeating audio by phrase. Tune Group 5 is devoted to 12 popular Irish tunes, and you can explore triple tune workshops laid out in the Irish section of Ed’s regular workshop materials, including a group of tunes by Turlach O’Carolan, and various jigs, reels, hornpipes, waltzes, and a group of swingy Irish reels, which allow you to learn some great and challenging tunes at a reasonable pace.

In Ed’s Mixed Tunes and Topics you’ll find a number of Irish tunes taught and discussed — just look in the following topics: Tunes by Ear, Tunes for Ornamentation, D & Dm Jigs, Holiday Tunes, Spooky Tunes, Marches & Polkas, Slow Airs, and Flowing Tunes.

©2022 Ed Pearlman

Bluegrass & Old-Time

Fiddle-online has some great old-time tunes for you to hear and learn, some of which worked into bluegrass fiddling after that style grew out of the old music back in the 1940s.

Below you’ll find links to free audio samples and signup info for some great workshops featuring old-time and bluegrass music. Each workshop features a performance video including a variety of tunes, and a teaching video of one tune with interactive sheet music presenting audio for listening, play-along, and by phrase. Cost is 6 credits for 2 weeks’ access (revisit or renew at any time at 1/3 off).

Continue reading Bluegrass & Old-Time

Fiddle Tunes from Scotland

Fiddle-online.com offers workshops in many different styles. One group of styles, Scottish and Cape Breton, is a specialty of Ed Pearlman’s, so these styles are especially well covered. Below you’ll find links to concert/workshops by the following great Scottish fiddlers: Alistair McCulloch, Bruce MacGregor, Jennifer Wrigley, Gordon Gunn, Alasdair White, Jenna Reid, Kevin Henderson, Mike Vass, Katie McNally and Sarah-Jane Summers.

In addition to the regular and guest workshops linked below, Tune Group 3 is devoted to 12 Scottish tunes, and Tune Group 4 has 12 Shetland tunes — all with interactive sheet music and audio for listening, play-along, and by phrase. You’ll find some Scottish tunes also in Groups 1 and 2.

Below you’ll find links to free audio samples and signup info for some great workshops featuring Scottish music. Each workshop features a performance video including a variety of tunes, and a teaching video of one tune with interactive sheet music presenting audio for listening, play-along, and by phrase. Cost is 6 credits for 2 weeks’ access (revisit or renew at any time at 1/3 off).

Continue reading Fiddle Tunes from Scotland

Tunes from Québec

The lively, free-spirited fiddling of Québec has been presented on fiddle-online by several masters of the style — Éric Favreau, Pascal Gemme, and Claude Méthé, plus a number of regular workshops featuring this style of music.

Below you’ll find links to free audio samples and signup info for some great workshops featuring Québécois music. Each workshop features a performance video including a variety of tunes, and a teaching video of one tune with interactive sheet music presenting audio for listening, play-along, and by phrase. Cost is 6 credits for 2 weeks’ access (revisit or renew at any time at 1/3 off).

Continue reading Tunes from Québec

Learn Tunes from Cape Breton

About 25,000 Scottish highlanders emigrated to Cape Breton, Nova Scotia and brought with them a very important part of home life: their music & dance. Most of this emigration took place during the years 1780-1850 as a result of the Highland Clearances, in which landowners cleared out generations of highlanders, sometimes by heartless and cruel means, to make way for sheep and a woolen industry. By contrast, only about 1000 Irish emigrated to Cape Breton during that time, which explains the strong Scottish influence in Cape Breton fiddling.

Today, the fiddle is the main instrument of Cape Breton culture, and fiddle-online offers a number of chances for you to learn the tunes and style.

Below you’ll find links to free audio samples and signup info for some great workshops featuring Cape Breton music. Each workshop features a performance video including a variety of tunes, and a teaching video of one tune with interactive sheet music presenting audio for listening, play-along, and by phrase. Cost is 6 credits for 2 weeks’ access (revisit or renew at any time at 1/3 off).

Continue reading Learn Tunes from Cape Breton

Spanish Colonial fiddling

Did you know about Spanish colonial fiddling, which came into southwestern U.S. starting in the 1600s? Not long ago, it could still be found in Colorado and New Mexico. Now it has been preserved by musicians in New Mexico, including Jeanie McLerie and Ken Keppeler, who perform as the duo Bayou Seco. They present a concert/workshop on fiddle-online to play this music, and to teach one of the tunes. Their focus is music they learned from one of the last masters of this style, Cleofis Ortiz, who died in 1996.

This kind of music is mostly dance music based on Spanish music brought in from Mexico since the 1600s, combined with traditional influences from other European styles which came through the area when the Santa Fe Trail opened up in 1821, connecting the Southwest with Missouri.

Mexico had lots of music in the 17th and 18th centuries, including baroque classical music, a variety of folk music, and many influences. Jeanie suggested an interesting influence on one of the tunes taught in Ed’s workshops on this style of music, Emilano’s Waltz, which Cleofis Ortiz learned from his much older cousin Emiliano. This tune may have had Sephardic origins. In the 15th century, the Sephardic Jews comprised 10% of the Spanish population and were well integrated into society when the new Catholic royalty kicked all the Jews out of Spain. Their deadline to leave was in 1492, on the very day that Christopher Columbus left for the new world. Their language was Ladino and can still be heard in various places, such as in Turkey where descendants of the 1492 exiles still live.

Learning tunes from various cultures teaches us historical connections we might never otherwise come across!

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*About the Past Workshops page of fiddle-online

  • On the right are concert/workshops presented on one Sunday each month by experts from each tradition. Just click on a name to learn more and hear a sample audio of the tune being taught. In addition to the tune is a 15-minute performance as well.
  • On the left are workshops by Ed Pearlman, from our regular Thursday live events, each workshop presenting generally 3 different tunes to learn, with sheet music marked by phrase, self-repeating audio by phrase, a playalong track at a moderate pace, and a listening track up to tempo. Click on the options to see descriptions and hear audio samples.
  • Once you select a workshop, you’ll need 6 credits to give you 2 weeks of access to the materials. If you ever wish to revisit the materials or need more time, the site knows you already used the materials and will charge you only 4 credits for 2 more weeks.

©2022 Ed Pearlman

The former centrality of Black fiddlers

Early 20th century social campaigns by influential moguls such as Henry Ford successfully and falsely reframed American folk music and dance as white and rural. Sadly, those biased campaigns had long-lasting effects. We have very few recordings of Black fiddlers, for example, because record companies decided there was no market for their music, even though Black fiddlers, dance musicians and dance callers made up about half of America’s talent in the 19th century, dating back to well before George Washington.

Old Hat Records has an interesting article on the topic which discusses the early phonograph records that did include Black fiddlers.

Another interesting article is about Teadar Jackson (1903-1966), a Black Texas fiddler. The article discusses him and the general topic as well. It quotes Tony Thomas in “Why Black Folks Don’t Fiddle” who writes “Black fiddling was fairly popular in the 19th century and in the early part of the 20th Century when string band playing and dancing were dominant in rural Black communities. Even when the blues and its own dancing replaced the older music starting at the turning of the century, fiddles, unlike five-string banjos, tended to be included in blues bands, and to accompany solo blues artists on records. Yet, in the 1940s when blues bands went from being acoustic band to electric, with the exception of a great few, Black popular fiddling disappears.”

On fiddle-online there’s a good tune by Alvah Belcher that taught me a lot when I shared the tune in a workshop. Belcher died in 1900 and was extremely popular and influential as a dance caller, fiddler, bandleader and tune writer. He also owned a store in his town. He was one person Henry Ford wanted to pretend didn’t exist: Belcher was neither white nor rural. You can learn the tune, hear a sample of it, and pick up more info about Alvah Belcher in this group of workshops.

A fascinating article on the subject was written by Jacqueline Cogdell Djedje and published by Cambridge University Press. It’s called “The (Mis)Representation of African American Music: The Role of the Fiddle.”

This article is usually linked at the top of our special Juneteenth fiddle-online home page on June 19.  Juneteenth has been celebrated for many years but became an official U.S. federal holiday as of June 2021. It commemorates the finalizing of Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1863. The final order, signed on June 19, 1865, ended slavery in Texas, the last state to allow it.

Hoping to have a good Black fiddle performer/teacher share music with us at fiddle-online in a concert/workshop. At this writing, no luck so far, but we’ll keep trying, and suggestions are welcome!

©2022 Ed Pearlman

Lift vs Lilt

Ethnomusologist Peter Cooke wrote an important book about the research he did throughout the 1970s in Shetland, called The Fiddle Traditions of the Shetland Isles. One interesting point he makes is what we’ll talk about here — the difference between “lift” and “lilt” in fiddle playing.

Listeners and dancers enjoy music only if it has lift, and they can only be charmed by it if it has lilt. Neither of these is dependent on perfect sound or intonation.

Lift

Lift is the easier quality to define. It is based on having a good beat. Traditional dance bands make sure they have lift, if they want anybody to dance, and if they want people to stay on the dance floor to the end of the program. Having played for, and danced at, many social dances to traditional music, I have noticed that if a band has a good beat, or groove, in their ensemble, everybody enjoys the dance. If their beat is a little sketchy or inconsistent, dancers mysteriously start finding themselves too tired to finish the evening.

Some bands overdo the beat, using strong bass, drums, and in some cases, I’ve heard an accordion or two squeeze hard on every single beat to the point where I feel like they’re hitting me over the head! This works for a crowd of dancers in a noisy hall, but it is not necessary. If musicians place the beat where it belongs, every time, because they feel it in their bones, their music will have a clear and strong beat, even in quieter sections. This allows a band, or a duo or a solo player, to have strong lift but still be expressive, with varying dynamics according to the feel of the music. These expressive qualities are obliterated by bands that hit you over the head with the beat, but if people are there to focus on their dance figures, they will likely have a wonderful time anyway. Of course, there are whole styles of music that are all about hitting you with a throbbing over-the-top beat, regardless of any attempt at a melody or lyrics, so it obviously works for many people!

There is another, little-discussed factor in having good lift, especially for voices or instruments like the fiddle, which can Continue reading Lift vs Lilt