Hitting the right note: O'Keeffe's unique technique

Matt Cranitch views O'Keeffe's bowing technique as a key to unlocking the essence of what has since become known as the Sliabh Luachra fiddle style.

It's often said that the "bow hand" defines a fiddler; that the quality of a tune is determined by the finesse with which the musician controls the bow as it travels across the strings of the fiddle.

O'Keeffe conjured a melancholic, plaintive sound with his bow, paying forensic attention to how many notes he chose to play within one complete bowing. In a reel, there are eight notes in each bar. Formal teaching might suggest that each bar is played in four sets of paired notes, or in two sets of four notes, but Pádraig O'Keeffe discarded the rulebook, and delighted in playing with the rhythms of these note combinations, so that at times he grouped them in a '3, 3, 1, 1' formation, and at other times played them in a sequence of five notes followed by three, or vice versa. O'Keeffe took standard music notation and adapted it to suit the fiddle and the accordion. Instead of concentrating on the standard five lines of the stave, O'Keeffe used the four spaces in between to represent the four strings of the fiddle.

He used the numbers one to four to represent the strings, and if two notes were to be played together, he simply drew a small arc or a "slur" sign above the numbers to illustrate this. If a tune demanded that a note should be played for only half a beat, O'Keeffe drew a "slur" or an arc beneath the notes.

"It was an instinctive method that made sense to his students, and brought the tunes to life in a very tangible and visible way," Cranitch says.