Elke has me working on repertoire reels, now, and we've started touching on the different styles. In her view, the old Highland reel style emphasized both accenting and swing in varying degrees, and different decendant idioms took different aspects and magnified them.

In the piping tradition, swing became paramount, and what accenting was left was achieved through snaps and ornaments. On the fiddle, though, swing tends to push the accenting into either a down- or up-beat orientation, since it's difficult to accent a note shortened by having time stolen by the previous one.

In the Cape Breton tradition, reels are played absolutely round, with no swing. Moreover, 3-in-a-bows are essentially unheard of. But there are some interesting accenting patterns. For example, with each letter an 8th note, o being unaccented, > being accented, two prominently used patterns are (taking the pattern within a single bar, though sometimes it happens across it):

| >oo> oo>o |

and

| o>oo >o>o |

These accent patterns correspond to groups of steps in Cape Breton dance. This is making it more and more essential that I eventually take dance classes for the various types of dance: Highland, Country Dance, Cape Breton step, Highland step, and so on. Dance tunes accentuate the dance, and the dance informes the dance tunes, in more ways than I thought. Exciting stuff.

She had an interesting observation about Scottish vs. Irish reels. "I've always seen Irish reels as 'flowing', where Scottish reels are 'punctuated'."

Interesting stuff...