Pull the Knife and Stick it in Again

Posted on November 14, 2014 by Gordon

An usual title for this Irish jig that completes our pair of spookily-titled tunes (see The Haunted House). Pull the Knife and Stick it in Again is in E minor or E Dorian, depending on your take on it, which contrasts nicely with a G major tune.

It was Matt Molloy who first put it into E minor from A minor and he gives the story that there once was a witch who used to ambush riders by dropping on them from the treetops. The way to break her spell was to stab her and leave the knife in, and as long as one ignored her pleas to ‘pull it out and stick it in again’, one was safe. It was follow to comply with her request, for once the knife was removed the spell resumed. According to the Fiddler’s Companion, the title apparently refers to a County Clare saying that relates to the Hag of Balla, which appears to be near Castlebar in Mayo as far as I can tell. It seems that the tune may also be related to a reel in A minor called Castle Kelly.

The tune goes below the bottom D of the whistles and flutes and there are two strategies that can be adopted when approaching this. One is substitution of the phrase for a different one that both fits the instrument and makes sense within the tune; the other is to more simply play the note an octave above the written one. This is the common approach with this tune.

Resources for the tune are now up. Our version is a little unusual and differs slightly from others in that it shifts into D in phrases, creating some strong contrasts within the melody itself. It is worth checking out the version on Fiddler’s Companion (above) for comparison.

Photo: Our version of the tune written out in the traditional music notation system that forms the basis for ABC notation.(c) Gordon Turnbull

The Haunted House: a flutey, whistley jig

Posted on November 4, 2014 by Gordon

Inspired by the Brownies who were having a Halloween party at our venue last week, I changed my plans at the last minute and made The Haunted House the tune that we focused on, a jig written by the late County Galway flute player Vincent Broderick.

As might be expected, his tunes are very accessible to whistle and flute alike and have become popular in Irish sessions. His tunes seem to fit the traditional idiom very well without trying to jazz things up or change things about, so that fit into the repertoire quite seamlessly. One distinctive trait of his tunes is the repetition of key phrases that then help to emphasise the rhythm in a way that feels quite subtle. My recording and setting are on the resources page.

The jig comes from The Turoe Stone, one of two books his compositions that he produced and there is also a CD available. Here’s a list of the various editions that are available on Amazon.

He received TG4’s Composer of the year award in 2003:

More tunes: Scottish and Irish jigs

Posted on June 17, 2014 by Gordon

A quick post to say that the remaining tunes for the term have been posted up, rounding off a set of Irish jigs and a set of Scottish jigs. Some of these have been discussed previously.

The new ones are The Jig of Slurs (follows The House of Gray and Drummond Castle) and The Mug of Brown Ale (follows The Killaloe Boat). You can find background information on some of these in previous posts, but all resources for them are now up to date, along with all of the other tunes. The Mug of Brown Ale I wrote about when I taught it at the Scots Music Group. The bonus tune is Dónal na Gréine, which we won’t have time to cover this term, but goes well after The Mug of Brown Ale.

Photo: Killaloe by BillH-GSACC, some rights reserved.

A host of jigs and an engelska

Posted on May 30, 2014 by Gordon

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 rare Scottish Jig: The House of Gray

Posted on May 16, 2014 by Gordon

After the flute activities of last weekend, it was back to normal this week with the regular FluteFling classes in Portobello. After putting some of the finishing touches to The Braes of Mar (to be revisited), we moved on to a tune that I had in reserve on the FluteFling Scottish Flute Day workshop.

The House of Gray is a tune in A minor that I came across in Kerr’s Merry Melodies some years back and appears to have been largely overlooked in my experience. A quick look online shows no recordings of it, for example.

Besides being a good tune, The House of Gray is useful for developing a few techniques:

The A to C’ natural transition at speed, found in many tunes, both Scottish and Irish
A decent-sounding C’ natural, which is generally weak and problematic on a simple system flute
Playing three C’ naturals at speed together in a tune and what can be done about this (tonguing or gracing for example).
Handling syncopation within a tune, a feature of many Scottish tunes

The tune itself leaps about a fair amount and can be regarded as typically Scottish in that regard. Very chordal in structure, some of the phrases are built directly upon arpeggios (broken chords).

The music for the tune can be found on the new Workshops resources page. A recording is on Soundcloud, found via the Resources page for the classes.

I was intrigued to see on Tune Archive that the jig is older than I thought, being first published in Aird’s collection of 1788. Gray House appears to be near Dundee and is currently abandoned and in need of its own revival.

FluteFling

traditional flutes and whistles in Scotland

Tag Archives: jig