A Big Thank You and Summer Workshops

Posted on May 7, 2018 by Gordon

Success for 5th FluteFling Edinburgh Weekend

First of all, a Big Thank You to everyone who was involved or attended the Edinburgh Weekend a couple of weeks ago. This was our biggest event yet and we were very close to being sold out.

Regulars Sharon Creasey and Kenny Hadden (basking in his new-found honour) provided our core continuity, with Niall Kenny as guest tutor and Claire Mann as guest speaker bringing in their own takes on the music and instruments. Feedback has been very positive and there was a real buzz about the place all day and into the evening.

FluteFling Edinburgh under way!

A post shared by Gordon Turnbull (@gordontheflow) on Apr 20, 2018 at 2:46pm PDT

A special thanks to the City of Edinburgh Methodist Church for hosting our event again – it really is a lovely venue with great acoustics. A big thumbs up to the Boda Bar on Leith Walk for hosting Friday night with such enthusiasm and to the Mercat Bar on West Maitland Street for sympathetically and efficiently sorting us out for Saturday. Very different venues to each other, but both highly recommended. Anyone looking to put something on should consider them as potential venues.

And of course Sandy Bells looked after us well on the Sunday lunchtime as always. One or two of us also made it to the Waverly Bar afterwards, where a great session was also to be had. A pantomime Booooo! however, to the session venue that let us down badly at very short notice (see the archive). I will try and do a more comprehensive round-up very soon, but I am now in the throes of report writing for school.

Summer workshops

After the April break, May and June workshops return this month. These will be the first since returning from Cruinniú na bhFliúit (Flutemeet) in Ballyvourney, County Cork and also since the FluteFling Edinburgh Weekend, of course, so I hope to share some ideas that I picked up over that period. NB Dates now corrected below – thanks to David Flett for pointing out the error.

Saturday 19 May 1-4 pm | Back at Tribe Porty, this will be suitable for everyone as I intend to focus on slowing things down, getting into the tunes further and helping with playing by ear. Tickets now on sale.
Saturday 16 June 1-4 pm | This will be a more sociable event and include a slow session that will utilise the FluteFling back catalogue. Venue and tickets tbc.

There will be a summer break over July and August, but there will definitely be further events from September, which will be announced just as soon as they become finalised.

Classes, workshops and tuition Autumn 2016

Posted on August 11, 2016 by Gordon

Classes for traditional flute and whistle in Portobello, Edinburgh are set to return this Autumn but details are currently on hold until September.

I am looking into options for resuming flute and whistle classes in Portobello, Edinburgh this coming Autumn but this continues to be tricky due to personal circumstances, albeit different ones from the past year. I expect this to become clearer over the coming few weeks so will have more news in September.

Regular group sessions

I am currently considering monthly Saturday workshops or fortnightly evening classes (as before) and while I have a venue in mind, will need to confirm this.

Individual tuition

Unfortunately I am unable to offer individual tuition at this stage. This is purely due to time.

Announcements

If you are signed up to the FluteFling Newsletter, then details will be announced there first.

Image: Musical mural at Ormeau Park, Belfast (c) Gordon Turnbull 2016

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 Hebridean rowing tune

Posted on April 25, 2014 by Gordon

The new term began last night with one of a handful of rowing tunes that I am aware of. Iomramh eadar Il’as Uist (Rowing from Islay to Uist) was originally published in 1815 in Captain Simon Fraser’s collection — perhaps my favourite of the older collections. If you don’t have it, a PDF of a later edition can be found on the International Music Score Library Project.

The Skye Boat Song is the best known of these tune types (see the interesting history of it on Wikipedia) and the Arran Boat Song is widely played but Rowing from Islay to Uist perhaps less so. I first heard it on Ossian’s St Kilda Wedding (highly recommended) and it has been recorded by others since.

Ossian played it in Am but it fits the whistle and flute well in Bm. It is usually written out in a slow, rocking, 6/8 time and it is often described as a jig due to this. 3/4 makes sense to me but I have adhered to the original time signature. It’s a long way from Islay to Uist, so take your time with this one. The weaker c# notes on our instruments can be bent to good effect.

Resources for the tune can be found on the Resources page for the classes.

Photo: North Uist near Solas by Scot Tares, some rights reserved.

Another Irish slide: Is it the Priest You Want?

Posted on February 2, 2014 by Gordon

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.

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