Tag Archives: Improvers

A host of jigs and an engelska

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Some new traditional tunes

As we go into the final weeks of the summer term, both group classes are working towards putting sets of jigs together, one Irish, the other Scottish. In addition, we tried our hands at a Swedish tune.

A Swedish Engelska

Portobello friends and neighbours Fun Fiddle have developed and shared their reportoire over a number of years, with some very fine arrangements and we have on occasion joined them for performances. Sweden has a very strong fiddle tradition and the Fun Fiddle 3-part arrangement (PDF link) of Engelska Från Småland presented a chance to try music from another tradition.

An Engelska is an English-style contradance popular in Sweden since the late 19thC. This one is from Småland in southern Sweden and here’s one of a few Youtube renditions of it, complete with flutes:

Henrik Norbeck is a Swedish wooden flute player who has an extensive high-quality resource of Irish tunes in ABC notation. He has also written an essay on Swedish traditional music and another on the flute within it. All are highly recommended.

The nyckelharpa is a type of Swedish fiddle and in Edinburgh, fiddler Gavin Pennycook has explored using it in the Celtic Nyckelharpa Project.

Update: I originally said that this is also a “walking tune”, but I was getting it confused with another tune, so have removed that comment.

A set of Irish jigs

Over the next few weeks the Slow and Steady Group will be putting together some Irish jigs into a set. Music notation for this will be up presently, the first two of these are now available to listen to, The Killaloe Boat (The Lilting Banshee) and The Mug of Brown Ale. We will conclude with Dónal na Gréine (The Leg of the Duck), which I will add in due course.

A set of Scottish jigs

Meanwhile, the Improvers and Beyond class are also doing a set of jigs, these ones from Scotland. The House of Gray has already been blogged and this week we added Drummond Castle. First published in 1734 in the Drummond Castle Manuscript, a version of it also appears in Anderson’s Budget of tunes for the German Flute or Violin of 1820, which Aberdeen flute teacher Kenny Hadden drew my attention to. I’ll be posting up my version of it, but here it is in PDF facsimile from the National Library of Scotland website:

Page 17 of Anderson’s budget of strathspeys, reels & country dances, published by the National Library of Scotland under a Creative Commons Licence.

Incidentally, the “German flute” in question is the transverse wooden flute that we know today, described so in order to distinguish it from end-blown flutes or recorders (flûte à bec in French, Blockflöte in German). For more information on the history of the flute, see Rick Wilson’s Old Flutes site.

We’ll conclude the set with GS McLellan’s The Jig of Slurs. Composed as a challenging pipe jig it concludes the set with a strong, interesting and well-known major key tune. A setting of it is given at Tune Archive, as is some discussion of its background.

The final two parts of that tune have had words put to them by Andy Hunter and I first heard Christine Kydd and Janet Russell sing this in 1990. A version sung by Lizzie Higgins, who knew Andy Hunter can be heard on the Tobar an Dualchais / Kist o Riches web site.

Top image: Maxicard of playing the fiddle on Midsummer, 1988 by Thereshedances, some rights reserved.

A strathspey: The Braes of Mar

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This is a four part strathspey that sounds very much like a pipe tune but the fourth part drops below the piping range, suggesting that this may be a fiddle setting.

The Fiddler’s Companion confirms that the itself tune is old, having first appeared in the Drummond Castle Manuscript of 1734 as Sir Alexander McDonald’s Reel and later printed in Bremner’s Collection of 1757 as Sir Alexander McDonald. It has traveled to Canada and Ireland and exists in many forms under different names, including as as fling and as a jig. Some say the Devil’s Dead is a well-known song in Ireland that is set to this tune.

I first learned this as an Irish two-part reel that I later realised was a fling. I then found it was a strathspey and discovered from Edinburgh fiddler Doug Patience (now in Meenross, County Clare) that it had a third part. And finally, years later I learned it had a fourth part. It seems that 2, 3 and 4-part versions are common.

The most frequent decoration here is cuts and casadhs (a late double grace note), but there is an opportunity to roll in the third part on the high E in the opening phrase and later in the 4th part on a low E phrase near the end. Keep a regular pulse throughout with the breath and it’s OK to tongue the shorter parts of the scotch snaps to give them more punch. Look out too for opportunities to put in a brief pause on the longer parts of the snaps.

The resources for the tune can be found on the Resources page for this year’s classes.

Photo: Native pine at Glen Derry, Mar Lodge Estate. Copyright C Mills 2013. Used with kind permisssion.

Summer term begins this week

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Pentland Spin by Barney, on FlickrA quick update to remind everyone that the Summer term resumes this week with the Slow and Steady class. The Improvers and Beyond class resumes next week.

There are five classes and no mid-term break. All dates can be found on the Diary page.

A reminder to book for the Scottish Flute Day on 10 May if you haven’t already done so. Booking is not through me, but through Tradfest. The response has been promising and spaces are limited, so make sure you aren’t disappointed.

Image: Pentland Spin by Barney, some rights reserved.

 

The Longford Collector

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After the recent challenges of The Tarbolton Reel, the Improvers and Beyond class looked at the next reel in the Michael Coleman set, The Longford Collector.

This tune in G sits nicely on flutes and whistle and offers some scope for variation, particularly in the B part. There is not much known abut this tune, which is strongly associated with this set. There are a few variations on the title, and an account of how Michael Coleman gave it its current title on Alan Kuntz’s Tune Archive web site.

Some information on recordings of the tune can be found on Alan Ng’s site Irishtune.info, which puts the earliest source of the tune as 1936, when it was first recorded.

I have put resources for this tune and The Sailor’s Bonnet up on the Resources page for this year.

Photo: Summer sky in Longford, Ireland by Paul Wilson, some rights reserved.

Another Irish slide: Is it the Priest You Want?

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The second of two 12/8 slides the Slow and Steady group are learning, The Priest is in G and sits nicely on flutes and whistles allowing some distinctive punchy phrases to pop through.

For further information on slides, check out the links on The Road to Lisdoonvarna, the slide in E minor that precedes this tune in the set. The tune is primarily constructed around a broken chord of G major and allows a strong rhythm to be developed through the simple repetition of a handful of notes.

Slides can be played quite fast so that the rhythm can be brought out and emphasised, but try playing it as a waltz while learning it in order to get inside it more. This maintains the relationship between the notes, but gives you more time to remember the tune. Decoration tends to be quite simple, just single cuts and strikes, particularly in the first part. The second part can take short rolls that help accent the rhythm, but only attempt these once you have the tune firmly established.

Resources for this tune are on the Resources page for this year.

A search around reveals that this may also be known as Is it the Priest You Want?, (Ne An T-Sagart Ta Uait?) which suggests that there may have been words to go with it at some point. The Fiddler’s Companion gives a version of it and identifies it as having first been published by Edward Bunting in 1796 and suggests it was more recently popularised by Johnny O’Leary, who learned it from Din Tarrant, both from Kerry. You can download a facsimile of Bunting’s The Ancient Music of Ireland from the Petrucci Library.

Like many, I originally learned this from a recording by The Bothy Band, who play this at the start of a set on Out of the Wind, Into the Sun, their third and final studio album. The Bothy Band, along with Planxty, were highly influential in raising the standards of Irish music recordings and arrangements in the 1970s. They influenced Scottish groups like Ossian (dubbed “The Scottish Planxty” maybe in more recent times) and Lúnasa, who have been compared with them for their musicianship and approach.

Photos: (top) The Bothy Band (c) unknown ( from Kölncampus website); below, album cover from Amazon.