Singing (6)

Play recording: Singing (6)

Ornamentation and ‘Pulse’

A questioner asks about the ‘shading notes’. Joe then talks about ‘pulse’ and ‘saying a song’ – telling a story in the song. Mike Seeger tries to help bring the questioner and Joe together with a few follow-up questions. Finally someone asks Joe to sing an example of an unornamented stanza and then an ornamented one. In response, Joe tries to sing a stanza of ‘The Rocks of Bawn’ without ornamentation, and then with ornamentation, to demonstrate what the addition of ornamentation adds in depth of feeling.

In the first, ‘you’re in a hurry to go somewhere; and in the other one you’re playing the act-you’re working exactly what Sweeney was doing, you’re going through the same thing he was going through before the song was ever made. You have the picture before you of the man going through this agony; and if he stops for one minute, somebody else will get his job. And that’s exactly the picture you must follow when you’re singing an old song, especially if it’s a sad one… You’ve got to have the picture before you, and you’ll do the song properly then.

With regard to ‘pulse’, a questioner observes that in some of Joe’s songs there’s a good deal of variability in tempo. Sometimes he will sing a verse, where there seems to be a pulse; then he’ll come to a section with nonsense syllables, where things will speed up; and then the whole thing will come to a stop¹. Joe responds with two things he’s said many times: (1) you should start slowly, build up to a climax, and then go back down again towards the end; and (2) the story about the lilting composition. In other words, he doesn’t answer the question at all.