The article gives an overview of the most well-known village fiddlers in Tori and Vändra parish, their repertoire, playing style and status as dance music players in the first half of the 20th century. This is one of the first efforts to try and describe Estonian traditional instrumental music from the inside so to say. First, the author learned to play the Estonian type of waltzes and polkas gathered from the local village musicians in her neighbourhood and used traditional method of learning by ear. Contact with the old fiddlers has been created artificially using the help of archive recordings datingback to the years 1936 and 1937. Following the personal experience of playing old fiddle tunes the author started transcribing and examining the tunes systematically.At that time both solo and duo performances were recorded from Tori and Vändra fiddlers. Those recordings compile the research material for the present article and on the basis of the recordings it is possible to describe how the fiddlers played back then. Transcriptions give an insight to the approach to form of the music and playing technique used in the fiddle tunes. Briefly, the body of those characteristics can be called the manner of playing the description of which introduces the musical thinking of village fiddlers and the overall characteristics of the performed music.What can be said to describe the traditional manner of playing based on the example of Tori and Vändra parish fiddlers? The districts of Tori and Vändra in the first half of the 20th century can be characterised by playing in fiddle duos. Compared to what was going on in Estonia of that time generally, it is not unique, because there were alsofiddle duos elsewhere. What is special about Tori and Vändra duos is how they wereplayed in. When playing in duos fiddlers used two different ways of playing. The first ofthem, one of the most characterising ones, is imitating bagpipe with fiddle, which wasonly used by Tori fiddlers. Imitating bagpipe is definitely one of the earliest of way ofplaying in terms of age in our old fiddle music. The other way of playing in duo performancesis simple polyphony based on functional harmony.Fiddlers made the melodies of Estonian type of waltzes and polkas more interestingand richer using polyphonic fiddle playing technique and embellishments of melodynotes. They used embellishments (mordents and upbeats) when they “felt like it”.Such means make a piece of music airy and general impression of the playing technique rather masterly.The structures of the analysed fiddle pieces are simpler and also of a rather surprising (and random) construction as compared to composed classical music. This is what makes the music under survey so exciting. Each piece offers something new and unexpected – prevalently the predictable and expected systematic thinking does not exist. In case of Estonian type of waltzes as well as polkas the most important idea is that the piece of music had a continuous metrum to support dancers in their dance. As a result of form analysis it appeared that different playthroughs of Estonian type of waltzes are freer in terms of their construction, or more improvised, polkas on the other hand are more stable. The dominant factor in the development of playthroughs proved to be the number of members in the performance. If it is a solo performance, the variations in different levels of form are more frequent than in case of a duo performance. It is also understandable as the co-play of at least two people requires previous agreement in approach to form.The playing style in traditional music, as a form of music learnt by ear, is quite individual in each player. At the same time it can be observed that the playing styles of two players living close to each other generally do not differ significantly. The same can be seen in the analysis of the fiddle players’ playing styles in the present research. The playing styles of fiddle players who live close by and play together are more similar to each other
