...snip...> Laura Risk taught for the San Francisco Scottish Fiddlers, and she took some time to demonstrate various styles (highland, lowland, Shetland). I started > realizing there's a lot more complexity there than I thought! After that I > started listening more closely to some of my favorite recordings vs. my own > playing and I realized that in reading the music, I tend to play it too much > like it's written and not enough like it should be played. As I listen more > it seems to me to be a fairly common problem with the SCD fiddlers here, > since a lot of us are coming from either a classical background or a > different fiddle style and don't have a lot of "pure" Scottish fiddlers as > mentors. I guess that's one problem with living halfway around the world > from the source of these tunes! -Steve
And the above is why my harp teacher and I agreed that I should not be studying with her any more because she is classically trained and I drove her nuts playing the way I thought (regardless of whether or not I was correct) it should be played. When I played a Scots snap, she'd try to correct me and when I explained what it was, then she wanted to know why it just wasn't written the way it was to be played. (sigh...) -- May neither your strings nor your spirit ever break, May your harp and your soul always be in tune. Rita Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
