Calendar of Events

The best Traditional Irish music can be exciting, rhythmic, and driving, but sometimes our playing of tunes can descend into a path of least resistance—merely a sequence of notes, nice, perhaps, but not music to get someone up to dance a step. This workshop refocuses our attention on the dance in the music and looks at ways to get lift and drive into your playing. We’ll examine elements of what we might think of as rhythmic variation (rather than the melodic variation we often try) in detail—the the spaces between the notes, making more space/dropping notes, lengthening them, ways of attacking and releasing notes, rhythmic contributions of ornaments, pulsing on the off or on beats, bouncing on notes, manipulating time, and so on. I’ll offer ways to think about it, some exemplary recordings for close listening, and some exercises to help build things in. Free to current Riley students and teachers and available to others on a pay-what-it’s-worth-to-you basis.