Talk to me about slides. What’s the difference between a jig and a slide (besides the obvious 12/8 versus 6/8)? Seems to me the slide is a little faster and has almost a fast waltz feel to it, right?
Zina, you still there? Harry? Will? Anybody?
Great question! My teacher insists Off She Goes is a jig, but I could swear that when I first learned it a couple years ago, she said it was a slide. Anybody know which is right?
I am missing Zina, too, by the way.
Glauber, here’s what Fintan Vallely’s Companion to Irish Traditional Music has to say about slides:
“The slide is a tune type associated with the jig family, in particular the single jig. A slide is in effect a fast single jig. It is in 6/8 or 12/8 time and the predominant rhythm involves the alternation of crotchets and quavers creating the feeling of long and short. Slides are essentially dance music and the long-short rhythm of the tune is echoed by the movements of the dancers. The tune-type is used in the dancing of sets and, along with the polka, is particularly associated with the music and dance traditions of Sliabh Luachra, where it is the brisk tempo of 12/8 tunes that dominates.”
That description was written by Liz Doherty, fiddler, editor of the revised O’Neill collection, and teacher at University College, Cork.
When I transcribe a slide, I look at the natural phrases to determine whether to notate it in 12/8 or 6/8. Natural 12/8 slides have long phrases that clearly fill a 12/8 bar (that is, they would overlap a bar line in 6/8). Examples: Denis Murphy’s Slide, Connie O’Connell’s Slide. Off She Goes is a single jig, and could be called a slide by Liz Doherty’s definition, but I would write it in 6/8 because of the predominantly short phrases.
Also, I’ve noticed that here in the states, people tend to play slides more slowly than they’re intended, sometimes so much so that they develop a sort of waltzy swing to them. I don’t know how dancers feel about this, but it always strikes my ear as odd.
I think in that definition the “crotchet-quaver” part is more significant than the “fast” part. That swung two-beat makes a slide, whatever tempo you play it at.
Listen to the Fonnchaoi record if you want to hear some fairly slow slides. The feel is exactly what I hear in a slide, but being Juile and Verena there’s no hurry to it at all. Lovely.
That said, yes, they’re usually played at a lively clip, same as polkas. However, the last time I played slides for dancers, they asked us to slow them down. Go figure.
This kind of swing is what reminds me of Viennese waltzes, the fast ones.
Hiya, I have not disappeared, I am only inundated in dance dress parts that have to be put together before Oireachtas the weekend before Thanksgiving!
Slides, hurriedly -- the thing about the time signatures is very true, but also true is the fact that Irish music was never really meant to be notated, so you’re trying to match two things together in a way that isn’t entirely natural. Doesn’t make much difference, Liz Doherty is of course quite correct, but it’s something worth knowing.
For set dancers, it seems to depend on the particular set as to how fast they want them played -- how complicated the figure, how well they know it, etc. You’d have to talk to a set dancer to get a straight answer on that one, and I’m not one.
For stepdancers, the slide is played for the dance known as the single jig, which is the descendant (near as any competent authority, har har, can tell) from the dance the moneen jig, and it’s played quite fast, though still not as fast as most session musicians play them, as usual. The steps are put together differently from the ones for the light jig, which is danced to the double/treble jig, because the feel of the music is different.
Put simply and without using technical explanations, slides tend to have more of a dumpty-dumpty-dumpty feel to them, rather than the double/treble jigs, which feel like diggity-diggity-diggity. If the penultimate Irish jig is something like the Irish Washerwoman (kidding, I’m kidding) then the penultimate Irish slide is Pop Goes the Weasel.
Irish tunes being what they are, of course, often you can play the same tune as either a jig OR a slide, since none of the dots are set in stone and it’s all a matter of feel. But, yes, Andee, Off She Goes is usually played as a slide.
All right, so much for my vacation from the embroidery machine, see you guys on the next one! 🙂 I miss y’all too!
Zina
Of course, Will’s post brings up the newer controversy of whether a single jig and a slide are the same things played the same way! 🙂
zls
An observation:
I’ve noticed that many tunes which are designated as slides often have a pair of dotted quarter notes at the end of each part. In addition to the dumpty-dumpty vs. diggity-diggity rhythm, it’s those nice, long dotted quarter notes which distinguishes some slides from jigs, and makes slides good tunes for beginners to learn, ce n’est pas?
Although jigs can be speeded up and used for slides in dancing, surely the general rule of thumb in defining jigs or slides is in the nature of their endings. A three quaver group followed by a crotchet or dotted crotchet is a jig, whereas a slide ends with two dotted crotchets. Although not all slides end exactly like that, that sort of defines the ‘feel’ of that sort of tune (and dance).
Gosh, I love this website--what a wealth of great information--and what a great bunch of people, too!!
Will Harmon mentions Liz Doherty’s revison of O’Neill. I have heard of this project but was not aware that it was published.
Is it ? If not, when? It sounds like a great project.
What Andee said goes for me too!
I remember a homepage I visited for a while. Unfortunately I can’t remember how I came across it, thought it was via the links-section here, but I can’t find it…
Anyway, this page was (or was partly) about the different rythmic patterns of Irish dance music, and this guy claimed that the connection between slides and jigs was a recent thing. According to him (if I remember it right) the slide originally was more of a 4-beat rythm. Like a hornpipe where you exaggerate the hornpipe-beat until it becomes a 12/8 rythm rather than 4/4.
This mustn’t necessarily affect the way we play a slide today, but the idea is a little bit interesting. But I have no idea whether it was this guys home-made theory or something that he actually knew.
There’s a tune Kevin Burke plays on his Portland album (I can never remember names) that is a hornpipe version of the reel that follows. But it sounds a bit like a slide too
I am so busy at the moment I shouldn’t be doing this, but I can’t let it go by. Kevin Burke plays a set on ‘Solo Fiddle’: Walsh’s hornpipe/Old torn petticoat slide/Old torn petticoat reel/Bank of Ireland. Have a listen. Slides are slides, that’s all there is about it. Cheers
Yah! Lars, I’ve been trying to say that for ages, without anyone taking me seriously. You can’t hear it in the dots - that’s why the old 12/8 is getting lost.
Jill
Well, I’m ignorant of this one and need some help.
I can’t discern a fundemental difference between Kevin Burke’s first hornpipe (Walsh’s) and the old torn petticoat (slide?). I havn’t heard it on his “solo” album, but on “Portland”? Hmmm
Lars -- the single jig IS a four part beat -- there’s no doubt about that. (Inexperienced stepdancers or those who have never bothered to care about the musical side of what they do get confused about what step to dance with slides all the time, and in fact you can dance a reel step to - the music - a singlejig/slide, but you can’t really dance a single jig step to - the music - a reel.)
The reason it’s written in 12/8 is because there’s also that “four groups of three” thing going on (in sort of a musical background) as well, which is why it’s so easy to pop from slides to jigs (and waltzes too, if you’re getting performance setty about it), but also easy to go from hornpipes and reels to slides…it just depends on what part of the beat you want to emphasize. Slides are not jigs, and jigs are not slides, but you can closely relate them if you like. Writing the stuff down in 12/8 comes as close as anyone can get to the peculiarities of a slide.
And, as Kevin Burke so ably demonstrates, the player may choose which of those two things -- the “four groups of three” thing or the four beats -- they want to emphasize, depending on what role they want the slide to play. And if you want to fool about with the dots a bit, you can even turn reels into jigs (Collier’s, anyone?) ably enough.
I once followed (and of course chimed in on) quite a vociferous discussion about what makes a hornpipe a hornpipe. For a classicist/purist/ethnomusicologist, there are all kinds of things that make a hornpipe a hornpipe -- the chord structure, the way the tune is built, this, that, and the other thing. For a player, it’s much less structured -- it has to do with the nature of the ending of the parts, and whether the tune sounds right when played in that player’s method of playing hornpipes (there’s two general ways of playing hornpipes). For a stepdancer, it depends almost entirely on whether it’s played syncopated and whether the ending ends in those three quarter notes or variation thereof. Look at poor Flowers of Edinburgh, which has been turned into a reel for quite a few people, but is definitely a hornpipe in structure.
There’s very few absolutes in Irish music. As Shannon Heaton once told me, “There’s a million ways to be wrong about this music, but there’s also a million ways to be right, as well.” Always good to remember that.
Zina
Penultimate doesn’t mean quintessence.
It means second to the last.
The fifth figure of the Caladonian may or may not be the quintessential figure, but it is definetly the penultimate figure.
People often use penultimate incorrectly. Perhaps they are thinking of pinnacle ~ the highest point.