Richard, not only is it on topic but it's a very live topic (for me at
least).
I was lecturing yesterday at Glasgow for the 3rd year Piping Degree
students (as Highland pipers they are exposed to two hours of Border
pipe music in three years...) and the Dixon variations - which predate
Peacock, but share the same aesthetic - were my main focus.
It's hard to get across to anyone in Scotland that music didn't start
with the Gows, but it didn't, and the genius of the Scottish fiddle,
John MacLachlan, flourished c. 1700, and his variation sets on Scots
tunes set the gold standard. They mainly survive in lute transcriptions
and there are a couple of good CDs around which feature them.
Meanwhile in England we have the Lancashire hornpipes of Marsden et al,
and the divisions of Playford somewhat earlier. It was in the air, the
idiom that has been called the 'Native Baroque', and
the Dixon-Peacock-Bewick-Clough line is part of this.
The aesthetic distinction is that with drones, and tunes based mainly
on two chords, you don't need continuo - drones are the ultimate
continuo, and the musician who can hear what the tunes are doing hears
the regular movement between consonance and dissonance with the drones.
What we do now (frequently) is to play with chordal accompaniment, the
modern equivalent of continuo, and for this to be worthwhile it has to
do something more than state the obvious two-chord pattern without
becoming totally irrelevant to it. A refined approach is needed.
Back to your point, there is at least one example of the division
repertoire directly entering the NSP repertoire - Johnny, Cock Thy
Beaver gave rise to Newmarket Races / Fenwick O' Bywell.
On Thu, Nov 25, 2010 at 5:50 PM, Richard York
<[1]rich...@lizards.force9.co.uk> wrote:
I was listening recently to a trio playing 17th/18th Cent.
divisions on
La Folia on the radio, and was struck afresh by how similar are
some of
the things appearing in the nsp variations.
(And yet different.)[Special aside for "Round the Horn" listeners
:) ]
Divisions on viols or recorders were normally played with at least
a
bass, and/or a harpsichord or whatever, and our
variations/divisions
must come out of the same culture in the first place, whether it's
later a parallel or a parent-child type development to get to
where
Peacock's sets arrived.
So, given that pipes are generally thought of as a solo
instrument,
(correct me if not!) do we know at what stage of development the
divorce from the continuo or ground bass instrument actually
happened?
Assuming it did.
Do the smallpipes with their variations repertoire first appear
having
already made the musical separation, or was there any practice of
playing them over a ground?
(Please note, this *is* on topic!)
Best wishes,
Richard.
--
To get on or off this list see list information at
[2]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
--
References
1. mailto:rich...@lizards.force9.co.uk
2. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
