Playing in 8 bars is a bit excessive- 3 or 4 in a night is about as much as I
can manage.
> There is a sociologically-oriented book by an English writer on the
> contemporary British session scene where he defines a folk session
> as a regular meeting of mostly amateur musicians who get together
> to play tunes with 8-bar structures. I thought, youch, that last
> bit sure hit the spot.
On first reading I thought, 'how devastatingly accurate', and was about to put
the fiddle up in the loft and forget about it.
Then I thought, 'that's like describing reading as being about deciphering
squiggles arranged in lines on sheets of paper'.
It's pretty weak as observation goes, but presumably the author went a bit
further? He could have said '... 8-bar structures with 3 chord
accompaniment'.
For irregular (non-8bar tunes), some of the Shetland 'listening' tunes are
examples: eg Da Day Dawn, Auld Swarra. Or 'Marnie Swanson of the Grey Coast'
which is pretty popular round these parts.
There's also the old trick of writing 8 bar tunes that don't sound like they
are, where the phrasing of the tune starts or stops before or after where
you'd expect it. It's more common in recent compositions especially with
syncopation breaking up the bar lines even more.
Derek
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