The Tunes All Sound The
Same
One comment that casual listeners to traditional music often
make is that the tunes all sound the same.
There’s a lot of truth to that. This
music was originally intended to be danced to in the days before recorded music. Dancers required melodies with consistent
rhythms and tempos to suit the steps they were making. Usually this amounted to an 8 measure A part (played
twice) and an 8 measure B part (played twice): an AA/BB format
that could be repeated an unlimited number of times. These similarities in structure can make it
difficult to distinguish between the tunes.
Nope, the Tunes All Sound Different
Anyone who plays this music or really listens to it starts
to realize that each tune is different. The more familiar you get the more unique they
become (and/or you learn to see the similarities in a different way). Those musicians playing for the dancers could
have probably gotten by on a handful of tunes, and I’m sure that some of them
did. However, it’s not unusual for an
experienced fiddle player to have a repertoire of several hundred tunes – knowing
how to specifically play each individual tune, rather than play “at” or “around”
them.
Compare To
Bluegrass
Tunes are instrumental.
Songs have lyrics. A large number
of bluegrass songs have essentially the same melody and chord changes, so a bluegrass
musician can apply the same licks and solos to a wide variety of songs and have
it seem different because of the verse/chorus aspect. On the contrary, with instrumental tunes you
might be playing the exact melody note for note but to the layperson it still
sounds the same as all the other tunes because of the lack of singing. I suppose that’s why the people that love
traditional music the most are the ones that play it, while the people who just
want to listen and be entertained gravitate toward more performance-oriented forms
of music.
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