Subject: RE: can accompanists lift the music
From: Jack Campin - PM
Date: 29 Sep 12 - 05:53 PM

Dick has started this thread as a way of importing an argument that started in TheSession. It got fairly acrimonious, which is why Jeremy has deleted it.

It's yet another occasion when Dick is importing a grudge from aomewhere else and hoping somebody will agree with a position he got trounced for advocating over there.

What Dick is objecting to is a point made at length by Michael Gill there, that in an Irish session, no amount of ingenuity in an accompaniment can do anything to improve the performance of a melody. It may have other desirable effects on the performance as a whole, but how well the melody comes across is solely the result of what the melody players put into it.

Which seems to me to be pretty much right for most Irish session music. If there are exceptions, I don't recall Dick providing them.

I wouldn't make the same argument for Scottish session tunes, which often come out of the danceband tradition where the harmonic and rhythmic backing may be conceived as a unit with the tune."

Jack, music is music, whether it is Scottish or Irish, may of the irish reels came from scottish tunes as you well know, so if you reckon that scottish music is ok to accompany, then logically   tunes such as miss mcleods reel, musical priest, Iam afraid your argument is nosensical because a good proportion of irish tunes were originally scottish.furthermore you are way off beam with some of your other comments the thread has not been deleted neither has nmy point of view been trounced, in fact i have just trounced your point that IRISH TUNES ARE SOMEHOW DIFFERENT,they are not because many of them were Scottish to start with.Check mate.