Description
Gerry’s Selected Irish Session Tunes is a collection of tunes I use when teaching students. The tunes have been arranged and transcribed for Violin, as well as Viola and violoncello, with chord symbols for bass lines, piano, guitar or other accompanying instruments
As a professional Irish fiddle player, I am given the great opportunity to partake in some of the numerous informal music sessions happening throughout the world.
One of the challenges I’ve noticed is finding tunes that we all have in common to play during our evening of making music together. Often, the default position is to play selections of mostly reels and some jigs, leaving a vast number of outstanding Irish fiddle tunes relatively unexplored.
Today, an unprecedented interest in Irish instrumental music is now enjoyed by a variety of musicians coming from a Western Art music background. For this reason, I have carefully selected and transcribed this set of tunes for violin, viola, and ‘cello. I indicate bowing patterns in places where I believe it will make the tune “swing” better! For me, the emphasis on developing bow patterns is an integral part of learning to play Irish music on bowed string instruments
This small collection is designed so that all players are playing the tune in the same key for them to play together. I prefer this to the more common resources for violas and cellos, where players often learn a tune a fifth lower only to find later that the tune they worked on, they are unable to play with others once they join the session.
In addition to enriching the repertoire of students of traditional music, this collection will be of benefit to those leading workshops in school orchestra programmes from second-level schools through colleges
