June 2024 – New Ealing Sessions

Tobin’s Jig and Hardiman’s Fancy

NB. Hardiman’s now has updated chords.

When playing Tobin’s Jig last week, we initially struggled to give the tune a sense of lift, lilt or dance – our solutions were:

Have the long line of each four-bar phrase our heads before we started, with it’s peaks and troughs. This got us away from focussing too much on the individual notes and patterns, and from the mechanics of playing this tune on our respective instruments.
Add some subtle dynamics – we followed the rise of the melody with a small crescendo (gradual increase in volume) and the fall of the melody with a diminuendo (gradual decrease in volume). Subtle is the operative word here! It isn’t always the case that we need to rise and fall with the melody, this can become a little obvious and predictable, but the idea is that we’re giving an additional dimension, or melodic shaping, to the tune.
Add some slurs over the bar lines (this is updated on the original post) – this can give the sense of moving forward across the bar line, with some very subtle syncopation in the phrasing.

Tobin’s Jig

A tune to potentially go with Hardiman’s Fancy, Irish jig Tobin’s Fancy. This has similar double-jig rhythms to Hardiman’s, with a similarly wide range of notes. At the time of choosing, I didn’t know what key Hardiman’s had been learned in, so D major was a good option for the various keys that this tune tends to be played in – we’ll find out later if that works!

24/6/24 edit: I have updated the tune with some slurs across the bar lines, to give the tune a sense of flow and lilt – these are purely examples of where these can go and should not be considered definitive or concrete! Three or four slurs per 8-bar section is plenty.