I like a little Celtic fiddle music as much as the next guy but I do not regard the fiddle as representative of the main flow of Celtic Music from ancient times till today, not by a long long, long shot.
Maybe its because I am a historian by bent or maybe its because I am not a instrumentalist.
See the problem is that I could not help but notice that from ancient times, the official symbol of ALL celtic life was not a lion or a sword but rather a musical instrument - and at that, a harp not a fiddle.
It remains the official symbol today, see everything in Ireland in the commercial world and on the coat of arms of Ireland, the UK and yes even my native Canada !
As a historian this told me that traditionalists in Celtic Music, so focused on fast fiddle dance tunes, were actually emulating only the Modern Era in Celtic Music - the 300 years since the upscale Italian violin moved down into poorer rural Celtic circles.
They were ignoring the thousands of years, before and after the rise of the fiddle, when the most popular music to Celts was a vocal song.
Even skilled instrumentalists find it difficult to successfully hum, whistle or scat sing a fast complex wide ranging instrumental melody.
But the typical vocal melody is both slow enough and of limited pitch range that it is easy to remember and hum, greatly helped by the sense of the words and story enabling one to better remember the tune.
Further I say that all over the world and all over the course of human history, singers have found it easiest and best to self-accompany themselves —- and that they did so by strumming and plucking a stringed instrument : a lyre, a harp, a lute and today a guitar.
Not singing while blowing through a wind or brass instrument, beating a drum or playing a fiddle.
(But maybe while playing a cello like instrument, playing a keyboard, or hitting a small drum.)
One can blow and then sing, its tiring but possible, but one can not blow and sing at the same time.
That leaves all wind and brass instruments out of the singers’ domain straight away.
Now one can pound a big drum and sing, just as one can play a fiddle and sing but to the listener neither sounds very good.
The problem is physical : a loud drum, even if played two feet below a singer’s mouth simply has too wide a sound spectrum and is far too loud to allow the needed separation between singers’ words and supporting accompaniment.
The fiddle, even played on the chest is simply too close to the vocalists’ mouth and is too close to the overtones of the singer’s words, to work well.
Singing and playing into the same microphone makes it even worse than hearing a fiddler-singer un-amplified.
But when the sound box of an instrument is physically far enough away from the singer’s vocal sound box, and acoustically quiet enough in volume and far enough away in shared overtones, a singer’s words finally get a decent chance to be heard.
And heard by the vast majority of people in all times and places who care first and foremost for the words and the tune - not what the sidemen are up to.
Getting the overtones soft enough and low in pitch enough removed from the singer’s overtones and get everything physically far enough away : this the harp-lute-lyre-guitar do very well.
In addition the plucked nature of the ‘chords’ seems to echo better how the vocal chords work , even compared to the bowed chords of the violin family.
Martin Henry Dawson’s Canadian Edwardian Era family were evangelical Presbyterian, very well educated and leaning towards the upper class side of middle class small town life, so music for them probably was more often heard in the parlour than on the streets in band marches or in kitchen ‘let your hair downs’.
And Dance Halls were totally out of the question !
Music was sung and played by amateurs in the parlour, usually led by young women or reluctant young male teens formally trained by a music teacher, but then joined in by everybody.
Parlour guitars, spinet pianos and harmonium pedal organs, wooden keyless flutes, violins, voices.
Not skilled enough to really be called chamber music but in ancient terms, definitely “inside” music to be contrasted with the “outdoor” oriented jazz music of the brass marching band influenced American ragtime, jazz and blues music existing in the same era.
Stripped down to its basics, it is really just back to the ancient harper-singer’s instrumental music consisting simply of arpeggio accompaniment melodies played beneath and between the intermittent phrases of a solo vocal melody.
Chords ? If you want to call a horizontal series of melody notes some kind of weird extended chord, sure.
But really just melody melody all the time : two melodies (bass and treble) chasing each other about.
So : not the LOUD THICK simultaneous thunder of wide and vertical block chords so beloved by musicians paid to make the sort of thick music arrangements required to fill a concert hall/dance hall/ parade square/sports stadium with hundreds or thousands of listeners adding to the din.
Parlour Music could be very lively indeed and very dynamic, but it remained very ‘thin’ : its simply didn't need to be LOUD, simply to be loud enough to contrast with other parlour notes played very quiet indeed.
Parlour got its variety partly from the fact it didn't adhere to a few 2 bar ostinatos in the accompaniment played non-stop throughout the entire piece in the American blues-oriented tradition.
Instead, the music was based on carefully arranged sheet music that varied both the treble and bass melody throughout the piece.
But in addition, the parlour audience didn’t like or need the thick loud non-stop playing of all the instrumentalists all the time (brass band-isms) needed to fill concert halls or streets with music.
Instead its musicians self-arranged to drop in and out, turn on turn, to add their heterophonic variants on the main singer-player’s efforts : playing this or that part of the bass or treble sheet music, maybe in unison but in another instrument’s timbre, or maybe an octave up or down, or maybe in staccato instead of legato, etc.
Often this was also as much down to the fact that most parlour amateurs were very amateur indeed and simply couldn't really play all that well, so they ghosted the score’s notes most of the night, but then dropped in the few licks they liked well enough to really learn well !
A few quiet instruments, playing turn on turn, scattered over a well-stuffed Edwardian parlour did not ‘blend’ like a big orchestra in an even bigger reverberant hall : instead the results gave a distinctly modern-like wide-panned stereo effect to listeners equally scattered across the well-stuffed parlour.
The relevance of all this to my musical on Dawson’s penicillin efforts ?
Well, I wager that less than 1% of the world goes to a EDM nightclub, classical concert or opera hall or rock stadium as frequently as for three hours once a week.
Most of us hear our 99% of our music in the modern-day version of Dawson’s parlour : on headphones, or from a laptop computer’s speakers, or from a small radio or Google box, or from our parlour TV speakers.
Yet because Americans love their music thick and loud ( “chords’n’drums” ) and America still dominates the thoughts of music producers world-wide, we still arrange our music recordings as if the music is mostly to be heard by hundreds and thousands packed into a vast noisy space.
The music of my Dawson Musical is going to be oriented to be melodic not harmonic, horizontal & thin but varied and dynamic, recorded in a parlour and meant to be heard in a parlour at parlour music levels.
And I suspect there even a lot of Americans will secretly love it that way, too.
But while I believe the parlour tradition of the family gathered around the parlour spinet filled with printed sheet music is never coming back, I don’t think the ethos of parlour music is dead.
My music from my Musical will be freely available for amateurs to play at home in re-mixable/muteable/changeable MIDI files with on screen lyrics, aka the .KAR files.
Karaoke sing over the Midi track live to your friends in your bedroom or living room, but first adjusting the tempo and key to better suit your voice, muting the existing vocal track and perhaps substituting an oboe for the recorder for the treble fills while my mellow jazz guitar sample is replaced by a harder distorted electric guitar sample, etc.
Your sibling, parent or relatives of course have their totally different take on the arrangement they want to sing to - while your aunt will insist on playing her guitar along side the Midi track.
Fair enough ! Live and let live, Parlour Style....
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