Cooley's Reel for C#/D box - voluntary simplicity! - YouTube

The great Joe Cooley, shortly before he died made the

following observation about Irish music:

"It's th'only music that brings people to their senses, I think!"

Well, if that's the case then we obviously need

a great deal more Irish music in today's world. Let's look at the reel that

is most closely associated with Joe Cooley

It's usually called "Cooley's", or Joe Cooley's reel.

We're going to take a slightly different approach today: we're going to

focus on simplicity -

how to get a tune like this sounding good

with the absolute minimum of

effort devoted to such things as ornamentation.

I think that when you first take up any instrument and start to play

Irish music, you tend to focus too much on the characteristic ornaments

and not enough on rhythm and, in the case of the button box,

you could say that this translates into an excessive focus on

fingers of the right hand

and not enough focus on the bellows, which is really...

It's like the bow of the violin: it's what gives the music its character,

its soul if you like. When you take up the violin you think

that the left hand is important because the fingers have to do all these

complicated things: find the right notes and stay in tune

and as you continue after a few years you realize that in fact

the bow hand is much more important

in the final analysis and that's why, if you're right-handed , you play

the bow with your right hand. Now why you use the bellows with your

left hand on the box I'm not sure but anyway let's look at it.

So we're looking at simplicity We're going to do almost no

ornaments as such - no twiddles of the fingers, no rolls, no triplets:

we're just going to look at how to put good rhythm into this tune

using the bellows, okay?

So let me just play the first couple of bars for you in this simplistic manner

Now if you saw this written on music you'd probably see something like this

or maybe

Obviously, if you play it like that you won't get much much rhythm into the thing so

here

these first two eighth notes these quavers here on B

we're going to play them like this

using the bellows to get our articulation, our swell, our rhythm if you like

going on

this time we're actually going to use finger articulation although as we

can see later on we could even dispense with that but we're going to play this

i don't know what to call this I was talking to my students the other

night and we decided to call it a smudge or a smear, I can't remember which.

Let's call it a smudge

Instead of playing a roll here or a triplet

we're just going to play

There are three notes if you like: if we played it separately

it would be

We're going to play the first two with this kind of smear

and we'll play the third just by lifting our finger

just try that with me

so put together that makes

try that with me a couple times

let's go on

From the beginning:

Going on we repeat the same bit

From the second half of the first part

Now, this run-up here

make it as legato as you can and put the emphasis on the on beats and offbeats

and not on the notes in between

coming down

That last part there, you might see written as

We're just going to play dah-te-yah-tee-yaam

and when you come down

if you're paying attention to your offbeats you'll get a big

emphasis on the E there and on the A

So here's the whole first part slowly play with me

OK, let's go on to the second part

if you play these pick-up notes here

Let's play the F sharp on the outer row there

now we're going to get some smears

instead of playing

or a roll or anything else we're going to play

Try it a couple of times with me

Then we get this arpeggiated figure here

we'll do a smear there as well

on the push this time

from the start of that little passage

the rest is the same as in the first part

Play the second part with me slowly - reasonably slowly

and there you have it. Now obviously there are a lot more

involved complicated tricky things, twiddly bits that you can

play in that tune but what I'm trying to show you

with this interpretation of it is that if you get the underlying pulse and

rhythm right first in a sense you don't need to do anything

else and then if you put some icing on your

cake in the form of rolls triplets and more complicated ornaments then you're

putting it on a solid foundation you're putting the icing on a good cake

So that's it really so my

advice to you for learning this way, this deceptively simple way is:

pay attention to your bellows

and especially in this passage here if you play this all on the row

(which I would) you need to be careful not to

get all staccato and the way to avoid that feeling is to

play the notes unevenly

and don't leave gaps in between: don't play

okay

pay attention to the offbeats on this way down

and there you have it! There's Joe Cooley's reel for you now,

there's a couple of variations if you like I could show you what could I

show in the way of variations

let's leave it at that actually

that when you get to know this tune you'll find that you can do beautiful

melodic variations they just they just happen

it's a perfect traditional tune structure for

variations and ornaments to be grafted onto no difficulty whatsoever

but just learn it that way and you'll have a really important lesson

under your belt and you'll find you can apply this to all kinds of other tunes

here's one that we might look at at some point

in class or maybe even on YouTube

Rolling in the Barrel

now if you look on YouTube you should be able to find a video of Andrew MacNamara

playing this along with his sister Mary MacNamara and i think with Eileen O'Brien

and Geraldine Cotter on the piano there's a little concert that's on

youtube and at some point Andrew MacNamara will play this tune and he is

really the

the best example I can think of of

a deceptively simple player he doesn't do much in the way of ornaments

but he has fantastic rhythm it's hypnotizing and

that is really what would call deceptively simple you think it's simple

and it is but there's

more going on than first meets the eye and so in that tune there

you know you might be tempted to play

or something like that but in fact it sounds great if you just

use the bellows to move it along

which is a lot different from playing

so you need to feel the rhythm and you need to translate that into little

impulses of your your left triceps Anyway I hope

you've enjoyed this lesson and I hope it

opens a few doors for you. Thanks for watching and see you next time!