so …
So … Jeremy barred me again and asked me why I ever post here if it annoys me so much. Good question.
There are a few things about this music which are simple and straight forward. And yet so many here seem clueless about these fundamentals. If I don’t get general majority agreement about these, then the "so called" music you play must be so different to what me and my mates play that I really must be pointlessly banging my sore head against a brick wall:
1. You shouldn’t share tunes with strangers via musical notation. You’ve no idea how they might murder them. (This of course, flies in the face of Jeremy’s mission statement, but its importance is evidenced the world over. The only saving factor is that this website has zero impact on the people who can actually play this music. Which leads me to the next point.)
2. If the worth of this website to you is as a "valuable resource", Then you are severely under resourced. So much so in fact, that it stands to reason that your music making will be severely impaired.
3. You can’t play the tunes on a bodhran.
4. The twiddley bits are part of the music.
5. (This one’s a little more erudite, and linked to the first point.) Phrasing is what makes the tunes work. Its importance can not be overstated. It’s what can lift the music beyond being a mere vehicle to dance to. It is the bread and butter of playing across/through bar lines. It is the art available to you when you remove the necessity to indicate to set dancers where they should be. And it is the meat and potatoes of making the tunes work when played too fast or too slow to dance to. I’m not saying that phrasing is not important when you do play for dancers, but that when freed from that constriction, it is what explodes the music to a different level.