From Faculty Academy 2007 Wiki
Bluegrass Breakdown or Presenting Patterns of Picking
- Gary Stanton (Historic Preservation, UMW)
Teaching with music has become so involved. First they won't let us play with needles, then tape recorders are where you find them, and all my friends were recorded with betamax. We can teach with ABC systems, or have a midi-life crisis (or both). But to really have students experience how a bluegrass banjo player gets his/her head around music requires sound and symbols. This presentation uses a mixture of encoded articulation (tablature for the musically liberal) as well as standard staff notation (for the musically conservative). Tunes are broken down into manually formulaic articulations of thumb-index-middle (right hand) that can be sequenced to provide a banjo player's equivalent of the tune. Approaches to tune creation, called style by some, are shown to be alloforms of recognizable patterns. Because of the speed and variation inherent in a non-compositional musical tradition, the players must select forms that can be sequenced⎯enjambment⎯or risk beginning a phrase that cannot be finished. The presentation includes variations of Scruggs-style, Keith-style and blues-chromatic. God-willing (and I know he is) the resulting collection rolls will become a version of "Doin' My Thyme" a tune famous, in some circles, for its association with Flatt and Scruggs, or The Greatful Dead (I can’t remember which). This presentation is aurally good.
