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 vary their intensity and dynamics while playing single notes (and there are ways for other instruments such as piano or bagpipes to accomplish this as well). This involves not only placing the beats but also implying the beats, by leading into them. Your bow can grow a pickup note into a beat note, and the listener will feel it coming and be rewarded by hearing it played strongly. Technically, this involves digging in with the bow, increasing bow speed, and using a very smooth change of bow direction. (If you don’t connect pickup to beat, you may lose the effect before it happens, by breaking apart the pickup and beat notes.) You can learn this technique using some of the exercises in Technique Video Group #2, such as “breathing bows” and can practice it using warmups like “long bows” or “double strings” in TechVid Group 1. Instruments such as piano or bagpipes can imply the beat by the way they use timing and grace notes; this also leads into some aspects of lilt that we’ll discuss below.

By implying a coming beat, musicians make their intentions clear. They create a pulse, a heartbeat for the music. In this way the beat is more of an organic pulse rather than a hammer hitting a nail — nor is it a metronome clicking the beat at you with no warning that it’s coming. Intention is musicality. This is why computer music as played via MIDI is so heartless that it can barely be called music at all!

Lift is built into Reel Bowing and Jig Bowing, as in the first two videos of TechVid Group 3. The beat note gets a lot more bow, and the other bows very little, making the beat clear mostly by contrast, rather than by the force of hitting the beat note hard. I like to think of the notes of a beat as the water in an ocean wave — the beat note is the crest of the wave as it crashes down, and the notes that follow are the water climbing to the next crest/beat note. Once the beat note is played, the job of the remaining notes within that beat are to lead us into the next beat, to rise to the crest of the next wave. The process repeats with every single beat, leading listeners and dancers to feel every beat coming their way. This creates amazing lift without hitting anyone over the head!

Lilt

Peter Cooke has a hard time describing “lilt” and rightly so. It is almost never articulated in words, only heard. In his book, he quotes dancers trying to describe the lilt that they find so essential to creating the desire to dance, and all they can do is listen to a player live or on recording and say “that has good lift” or, as Cooke writes, “they resorted to gestures, commonly beginning, after a long pause, with ‘well, it’s very difficult to explain, it’s a kind of … [gesture].’”

Lilt is the timing that is played between the beats. It is almost never actually notated in written music. Sometimes it’s so strong, as in strathspeys and certain marches or hornpipes, that it is written into the music with dotted notes, but even those notations fail to get across the true feeling of the playing.

I once heard the great Shetland fiddler Aly Bain teaching a tune. In one part, he slowed the notes way down, but even when focusing on showing people what the notes were, he was unable to play them evenly. The lilt of the music was too much a part of him to simply play one note after another. Often, the beat note was held longer and the second note was a quick pickup to the next note. Sometimes, the reverse happened, where the beat note was sharp and quick and the second note took up the rest of the beat, or half-beat, until the following note.

Peter Cooke demonstrates this in his book by using graphs of the sound fiddlers produced, and matching them up with the notes of the tune they were playing. The graphs used “electro-chymography” done at a lab in the Dept of Linguistics at Edinburgh University. Cooke calculated that pairs of notes in reels were uneven to a proportion of 4 to 3, sometimes 5 to 3, and occasionally even 2 to 1. This was clear even in playing recorded by Willie Hunter, who was known as one of Shetland’s most brilliant fiddlers, not just for his clear sound and perfect intonation, but for his lilt — the danceable rhythm between the beats.

Cooke quotes an old dancer from Shetland complaining about a fiddler who was playing for a dance accompanied by a guitarist. “Stop, stop, I canna hear the fiddle,” he said. He liked to do stepping to match the “true rhythm of the tune” as he heard it from the fiddle, and not just the generic “thump thump” of the guitar keeping the beat!

Lilt is so difficult to put into words that none of the people Cooke interviewed could describe it. Even fiddlers, when asked what lilt was, would simply pick up their fiddle and demonstrate it.

Being the rhythmic feeling, the timing between beats, lilt is done differently in different traditions. It’s one thing in Shetland, another in Ireland or Sweden or Appalachia.

The more you listen for lift and feel the lilt, the more life you’ll put into your playing.

©2021 Ed Pearlman