Wendy Galovich wrote:
>
> At 07:25 PM 1/13/2001 -0500, Jeri Corlew wrote:
> >
> >I was mostly joking about the "every now and then" bit, but I'm a long way
> >from having mastered the technique. I figure if it feels right, I simply
> >need more practice. This may sound weird, but I found it helped me to turn
> >my hand so the movement was more up and down than sideways. (I noticed
> >Harvey Tolman plays like that, and decided to try it.)
>
> It's not weird - he uses the old traditional Cape Breton way of
> holding the fiddle with the top nearly vertical and the instrument much
> more out in front of him than the standard classical hold, and that en-
> ables him to bow up and down rather than horizontally across the strings.
> It also neatly facilitates the way he uses his wrist. Many Cape Breton
> fiddlers play that way - John Campbell, Alex Francis MacKay, David Green-
> berg, to mention just a few.
Yes, I hold my fiddle like that. Don't try to balance a marble on the
top of my fiddle when I'm playing :-) It fundamentally changes the
physics of how your bow draws sounds from the strings.
> David and Harvey have got the most fluid wrists I've ever seen,
> and in spite of his huge hands, John Campbell is almost delicate in the
> way he handles the bow. I haven't seen Alex Francis play (maybe Toby
> can tell us about that), but judging from the broad variations in sound
> that he is able to draw from the instrument, I'd have to guess that it's
> similar to the others.
Alex Francis does some really weird stuff. His playing is unlike anyone
else's currently alive on CB Island. He'll take a very stock tune out of
one of the old collections and instantly apply Alex Francis-ism's to it.
Then when he's done, he'll talk about how much money he hopes in win at
Bingo this week. :-) Seriously, he has some very pipey left-hand stuff
he does, and alot of his bowing seemed to vary in pressure at least
three different places during the course of his bowstroke. I could put
up a sound sample of a good clear piece of his playing if people would
be interested in listening to it.
He's also one of the few players left that spoke Gaelic before they
spoke English.
Toby
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