Fiddle improvisation

Commons ↗

Fiddle improvisation is the practice of varying or inventing music on the fiddle, the violin as played in folk and popular traditions, during performance. In most fiddling traditions it takes the form of variation on a known tune rather than the invention of new melody. Linda Burman-Hall called this "perpetual variation" the most profound difference between folk fiddling and classical violin playing: a traditional fiddler may play the outline of a tune differently each time through.^[1:1]

How much fiddlers vary, and how, differs from one tradition to another. Irish fiddlers vary tunes largely through named ornaments and small melodic changes.^[2:1] Texas contest fiddlers build elaborate, partly pre-arranged variations of old tunes.^[3:1] Bluegrass fiddlers take turns with other instruments at solos, or "breaks".^[4:1] Jazz violinists face particular technical challenges in improvising, which help explain the violin's marginal place in jazz.^[5:1] For improvisation in music generally, see musical improvisation; for bluegrass in particular, see improvisation in bluegrass music.

Variation and the tune

Scholars of fiddling have often described improvisation as working against a mental model of the tune rather than a fixed text. Citing Samuel Bayard, Burman-Hall writes that a traditional fiddler keeps several equally acceptable ways of playing certain passages in mind. Even fiddlers who insist on a single correct version introduce changes, and over time this re-creation can alter, merge and recombine tunes.^[1:2] In Irish music, as Stephen Slottow summarizes, Micháel Ó Súilleabháin described a "partially inaudible structural model" of a tune "against which the player improvises", and James Cowdery wrote of a "tune model" held in the mind of the player and the community.^[2:2]

Slottow distinguishes ornamentation, meaning stock named figures that decorate or connect notes, from variation, meaning freer changes to melody and rhythm, but treats ornamentation as one kind of variation. He observes that most North American fiddling styles stress variation without having a repertoire of named ornaments.^[2:1]

Southern American old-time fiddling

In her 1975 study of Southern fiddle styles, Burman-Hall found that variation in old-time fiddling works mainly through changes in bowing, which alter rhythm, and in melody.^[1:1] She distinguished four regional substyles (Blue Ridge, Southern Appalachian, Ozark and Western) partly by how fiddlers vary a tune. Blue Ridge fiddlers concentrate their variation in the low, or "coarse", strain of a tune. The Southern Appalachian region produced the most major variants. Western fiddlers, in Texas and Oklahoma, made deliberate changes, with few of the incidental variations found elsewhere.^[1:3]

Southern fiddling grew from exchange between Black and white musicians. Paul Wells describes dance music played on the fiddle as the earliest meeting ground of the two, dating from at least the late 17th century. Drawing on Alan Jabbour, he argues that the syncopated bowing patterns characteristic of Upper South fiddling were likely an African American contribution.^[6:1] Wells also concludes that the blues strongly influenced white Southern fiddling and the commercial genres that grew from it.^[6:2]

Irish fiddling

In Irish traditional music, ornamentation is essential. Slottow, in a study of the fiddler Eileen Ivers, notes that a tune is never played "straight" except to beginning students. Fiddlers vary each repetition by changing named ornaments such as rolls, cuts, crans and bow trills.^[2:1] Ivers described traditional melodic variation as modest: "just taking a little bar or two and just altering the notes a little", around the chords of the tune. She contrasted this with freer modern approaches.^[2:3] Kathleen Coker similarly contrasts Irish ornaments, which decorate particular melody notes, with the harmonically based "licks" and "runs" of bluegrass, which need not follow the melody at all.^[7:1]

Texas contest fiddling

Texas fiddling developed under the influence of frequent, sometimes lucrative fiddle contests. According to Michael Mendelson, the competition led fiddlers to develop ever more elaborate versions of tunes as contest showpieces. It also stressed the fiddle as a solo instrument rather than part of a band. Eck Robertson's 1922 recording of "Sally Gooden" already used 13 distinct strains, where Anglo-American fiddle tunes usually have two. Deliberate variation became one of the defining features of the Texas style.^[3:1]

The Texas fiddler Benny Thomasson, interviewed in 1973, said the tunes of his father's day "never had any variation to 'em". He, by contrast, had "arranged variations of the same parts in different positions on the fiddle", spurred on by competition at contests.^[8:1] Comparing many of Thomasson's performances, Mendelson found that his variant strains stayed similar from one performance to the next, while details were added in the moment. He likened this to the "oral-formulaic" process by which epic singers compose from stock phrases.^[3:2] Thomas Adler, writing the same year, proposed a similar formulaic model for bluegrass banjo.^[9:1]

Bluegrass fiddling

In older string bands, the fiddle usually led the ensemble. In the 1940s, Bill Monroe let his instrumentalists trade leads and tried improvised solos.^[4:1] In bluegrass, the fiddle became one of several lead instruments taking turns at the melody "or some variation upon it". L. Mayne Smith noted in 1965 that some instrumental pieces include a strain of no fixed length, played as an improvised fiddle solo over a single chord.^[10:1] In Monroe's band, Chubby Wise brought a "blues-tinged" fiddle in 1945. Kenny Baker, who joined in 1967, played what Charles Wolfe called a mixture of Texas, modern country and Kentucky styles.^[4:2]

Bluegrass fiddlers also play behind other soloists. In Monroe's "Muleskinner Blues", the fiddle took the opening solo, and the lead passed back and forth between Monroe's voice and the fiddle. Between phrases, fiddlers filled the gaps, as when Benny Williams "leaps in early to fill up the silence with high G wails".^[11:1] In 1966 the fiddler Richard Greene developed an elaborate percussive accompaniment stroke, the "chop", which later spread well beyond bluegrass.^[12:1]

Jazz violin

The violin was part of African American music before jazz, as a significant early blues instrument, and part of early jazz bands. Yet by the 1940s it had become marginal in jazz. The jazz violinist and scholar Ari Poutiainen attributes this to the violin's lack of a percussive attack, the difficulty of amplifying it, and above all the technical demands that modern jazz improvisation placed on violinists.^[5:1] Joe Venuti, one of the most influential early jazz violinists, was a swing player whose improvisations stayed largely within the key. He told the fiddler Matt Glaser that when improvising he used his first finger "like a capo" and played across the strings within one hand position. Glaser called this "Venuti's Constant": "stay in position whenever possible, and play across the strings". It contrasts with the classical habit of shifting position to keep a phrase on one string.^[5:2]

Crossover fiddling

From the 1970s, some fiddlers moved freely between traditions. In New York, fiddlers including Kenny Kosek and Matt Glaser belonged to a scene centred on the band Breakfast Special, whose improvising drew on jazz, psychedelic, klezmer and avant-garde music.^[13:1] From the 1990s, a Boston scene mixed players of Irish, Cape Breton and Scottish music with bluegrass musicians, in what Laura Risk calls a "fluid and improvisational" atmosphere. Techniques spread informally through house parties, fiddle camps and Berklee College of Music. When Oriol Saña began teaching these techniques in Barcelona in 2002, his students asked about both "the chopping thing" and "the improvising thing".^[12:2] Glaser has contrasted the stylistic barriers of the 1970s with a present in which young players expect to play "Celtic music, bluegrass, classical music, old-time, jazz, all at a high level".^[13:2]