We had another really enjoyable (and packed!) session on Wednesday this week, and it's got me thinking about ideal sessions again...
If you want to hear more musicians' perspectives around their ideal sessions and session etiquette, I highly recommend giving Tara Connaghan's podcast In Tune with Tradition a listen!
A lot of Tara's guests will say that their ideal session size tends to be around 6-8 players. And typically these players would play at a similar level and have a mostly shared repertoire with a few outlier tunes.
I do tend to like those sessions a lot too. I have a sneaking suspicion that I'm an ambivert, and some weeks are more introverted where others are more extroverted.
But this past week we had 15-16 musicians packed together at Sean O'Callaghan's, and it really was a fantastic session!
We had several visitors from other parts of Michigan and northeast Ohio, our regular suspects, and a few local musicians who don't always make it out every week but are great to see when they do.
The tunes were great. The conversations and catch-ups were great. The flow of the evening was great. It was just really enjoyable!
And at no time during the evening did it feel like a rigid "you must follow this set of rules" in order to make the experience enjoyable for all. (Of course I can only speak for my own enjoyment here, but I don't think I was the only one enjoying the evening.)
It felt like a session should! Relaxed, friendly, and open.
We played a lot of shared tunes, but didn't need to consult a tune list or only combine two to three tunes in the exact same set every time. We found common ground through conversing with one another, or from showing up week to week and knowing the tunes that tend to come up in rotation.
We didn't always play the tunes through 3 times each. A good starting point to be sure, but when the energy was high we kept playing another few times before switching it up. The music had room to breathe and to settle.
Weekly Tune Library Update
Some great requests this week in the Tune Library! Martin Wynne's No. 4 is up now (and I'll add in 1, 3 and 5 soon in that order).
Also coming soon are Dowd's No. 9 and The Gold Ring!
I leave for the Swannanoa Gathering Celtic Week next weekend, so I won't be recording tune tutorials during that time. I will try to get as many of these up this week as possible, but this may be more of a "tunes that will be up by end of July" kind of list at this point!
This isn't to say that I don't think a session should have structure. You need at least a little bit in order to be somewhat organized. And there can be unspoken rules that often don't end up being addressed until they're broken (hence why I recommend Tara's podcast)!
But if you worry too much about the guidelines, then it can take away from the musicality and overall enjoyment of the evening...
So have fun, play the tunes, have the chats, and be open to multiple kinds of "ideal" sessions!
Happy playing!
~Hannah
Hannah Harris
I help aspiring Irish fiddlers find their lilt and get the real feel for the music.
โ