Matt Cranitch, Fiddler Extraordinaire

By Gwen Orel

On the last night of Catskills Irish Arts Week (CIAW) (irishvillageusa.com, July 11-17 2010 are this year's dates) the session at Furlong's went on until well after dawn. People got a little bit punchy around five a.m., purple hats were worn, but the tunes just kept going, sprightly and clear (and the Guinness kept pouring, too).

One of the fiddlers in the silly purple headpieces was Cork fiddler Matt Cranitch. He had played a concert on the mainstage earlier that night but showed no signs of slowing down, despite a brewing cold, and the evenness of his bow arm as it went back and forth was so smooth it looked almost mechanical.

That mechanical impression is not an insult, and is not coincidental: one of Cranitch's goals when he teaches is to encourage students to think about how they make the sounds, which he described on the phone to the Irish Examiner from his study in Cork as "reverse engineering."

It seems you can take the fiddler out of engineering but not take engineering out of the fiddler: Cranitch has an undergraduate degree in electronical engineering, as well as music. He also has a Ph.D from the University of Limerick, and wrote his dissertation on Pádraig O'Keefe and The Sliabh Luachra Fiddle Tradition. Put those two things together, add in his training in classical music and his fluency in Irish, his first language, and you get a fiddler simultaneously immersed in history and technique. And teaching, of course; Cranitch is the author of The Irish Fiddle Book (now in its fourth edition, since first published in 1988), and appears at Catskills Irish Arts Week, among others, to give workshops as well as concerts.

Tri-state fiddlers can take in a class with him in New Jersey next weekend, in fact, among other events in the area which will offer the opportunity to learn what's unique about Sliabh Luachra style: the masterclass is at the Middletown Arts Center, (middletownarts.org), the Session at the Dublin House Restaurant and Pub (dublinhouseredbank.com), on Sunday, February 28th. But the day before that,

Cranitch will play in a session at Lillie's Pub in New York City (lilliesnyc.com) from 4-7 p.m. Saturday, Feb. 27th. And his band Sliabh Notes, which includes Dónal Murphy on accordion and Tommy O'Sullivan on vocals and guitar performs on March 4th, in Newtown, Connecticut, for the Shamrock Traditional Irish Music Society (shamrockmusic.org).

"I have a facility for helping people find their own voice through their music," said Cranitch, whose book grew as a result of his work as a teacher. For example, he explains, a jig has a measure of 6/8, but a count of 1-2-3 is also the count for a waltz. "So what do you have to do with the bowing hand so it comes out sounding as a jig rather than something else?" It's in the inner accentuation patterns, he says.

The goal is "to make the music shine out better, rather than a sequence of notes." He hopes students will begin to self-monitor and ask themselves, "what do I have to do to make it sound like that?"

In fact, his fiddle book developed after he determined that the secret of Sliabh Luachra style was in the bowing. "I think it's probably the only fiddle book out there with the bowing marked to the extent that I have done. I don't think it's enough just to give people the notation, put a grace note there and off you go..."

While you can't really learn an instrument from a book, the book gives people pointers about what they need to do. Because Cranitch also studied classical music, he's well trained in theory and orchestration, and even conducted in college. "It was a stepping stone to lead me on to my master's and Ph.D., but my heart wasn't in it," Cranitch admits, and he always knew he would be a traditional fiddler.

Still, the classical background helped him learn "how violin playing works. I know a lot about issues like dynamics and vibrato" which ultimately helped him analyze what the great Sliabh Luachra fiddler Padraig O'Keeffe was doing, "how people articulate the bow and how high harmonics are executed."

Sliabh Luachra style is different from the New York style, Cranitch explains. The term refers to several things, including "a geographic area with kind of undefined boundaries," bordering on County Cork and County Kerry and stretching into Limerick. Literally the words mean "marshy soil." On both sides of the river Blackwater, Cranitch says, there was mountainous stretches and poor quality land. It was remote, cut off, but creativity flourished.

In addition to playing more slides and polkas than New York fiddlers typically play, Cranitch says that the ornamentation is more rhythmic, with "more double stringing used." Of course, these differences are subtle to those who aren't already immersed in Irish fiddle music. "Brian Conway plays a lot different from Tony DeMarco, but from this side of the Atlantic we'd say they both play New York style." And the differences in style do not mean at all that Cranitch can't play with those two fiddlers as he loves to do, and has been known to do, at all-night sessions in East Durham.

"At East Durham the sessions go on for ten hours!" Cranitch laughs. "The rush of adrenaline and creative enthusiasm is overwhelming at time; I never get sore fingers. I enjoy playing with people I haven't played with, and people I have; there are various interactions going on at the same time; learning new material, a new approach, hearing other people. I like the opportunity to play in a session when it presents itself, as it seems to do on the East Coast of the U.S., where there are loads of fiddle players. The sound of five or six fiddle players is just magic. Over here, there might be three or four accordions and a few fiddles, which is very difficult to contend with. The East Coast of the U.S. has a huge fiddle tradition going back to TK Colman and Andy McGann." Brian Conway and Tony DeMarco are part of that, he says.

He will again be at CIAW this summer, and in fact, will be launching the new Sliabh Notes CD there in the US. "I love the Catskills, the people who come to participate are so committed. I come home from it exhausted and exhilarated." Sliabh Notes hasn't had a new CD since 2002, with Along Blackwater's Banks, but it has finished recording and they may well play some tunes from it in Connecticut March 4.

While the group plays music from the Sliabh Luachra repertoire, they also play music from other parts of Ireland, and "Tommy [O'Sullivan] grew up in London on the folk music scene there," so the band combines all the different strands. They have also played for ceilidhs and dances, and "bring an energetic rhythmic approach to concert performances as well. People like to hear the unleashing of high energy the music has." But they will also play some slow airs and plaintive reels, he said.