steve shaw. if you cant read go to specsavers,

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.