>| The tune is 'Mike Hoban's Air' and is located in a slightly separated >| manner at the bottom of the list of tunes on that page. > It's a nice tune, and it's in A dorian. This is the most common > "minor" mode in traditional Irish and Scottish music, which is why it > probably sounds Irish to your ears. > The "Dorian" mode is basically similar to what the classical folks > call "natural minor" (or "Aeolian"), but the 6th of the scale is > sharp. It's actually a fairly common sort of scale in a lot of the > world.
The tune is really in the dorian/minor hexatonic scale, which is even more common in Western Europe. F only occurs as a passing note in the triplets, and you could eliminate both F's without perceptibly changing the tune. It's a variant of the Occitan air "Al Lebat de l'Auroro" (i.e. celtic schmeltic) which I include on my CD-ROM. Doubtless there are other variants of the same thing all over Europe, and if it was well known all round France by the 1830s it had plenty of time to get to America. Maybe it was used as a hymn tune? the book I got it from would have been readily accessible to a mid-19th-century hymnodist. > To make it sound even more traditional Irish or Scottish, harmonize > it with A minor and G major chords. It'll probably be obvious where > to use each. Those two bars that read |g3ec2| might sound best with > a C major chord. Note, the result of that choice is that the F is omitted in the harmony too. John's fingers agree with my characterization of the mode when playing the bass buttons on his accordion even if they don't when typing. E minor (V) would also be consistent with the mode; B minor (II) and D major (IV) would not. There's a lot more about hexatonic and pentatonic modes in the tutorial on my webpage. =================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> =================== To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
