[high G in the pipe scale]
> The sharpened note is not out of tune. It is imitative of the *correct*
> sharp pitch of the appropriate note on (in this case) Border pipes.
Yeah, but. This is a modern guess. Surviving old Border chanters have
often had this note drastically recut to sharpen it, as if the expected
pitch (and presumably the repertoire of tunes being played) had changed
a lot over the years. It isn't clear that in-between was seen as the
ideal place to be, just that it suited later tunes better than the flat
seventh, even if you couldn't chisel and file it all the way up to G#.
I don't think the definitive explanation of what's going on here can
be purely in terms of instrument characteristics. Even purely vocal
melodies sometimes demand that the low G be definitely natural while
the exact pitch of the high one doesn't matter very much; nobody makes
pipes with a sharp low G, though it's just as easy to do as the normal
construction. Saying a choice of pitch is a result of the way pipes
are made begs the question of why the pipes were made that way in the
first place. Which is a matter of music rather than carpentry.
> Odd thing is that similar brief bursts of 'drone' occur in smallpipe
> playing
What do you mean? The actual drones don't do "brief bursts"; are you
talking about using a chanter note as a secondary pedal by filling in
the subsidiary beats with it?
[ringing strings on fiddles]
> Now I may be told that exactly the same things happen in Irish or
> English, Welsh or Appalachian music (or if Jack's reading, Turkish....)
> so this may not be Scottish style.
Doesn't have to be exclusively Scottish to be Scottish...
You certainly do get the same thing in Appalachian fiddling (listen to
Bruce Molsky), and in Scandinavian styles. You don't in Turkish playing
on either kind of "keman" (a word used for both Western fiddles and for
an instrument from Central Asia resembling the Chinese er-hu), as they
are played in as vocal a manner as possible. You get a LOT of it in Black
Sea fiddling (using the "kemence", shaped like the old European "kit") but
as that's tuned in fourths, played with lots of double-stops and three-
strings-at-once bowing, it sounds really different; the least vocal music
imaginable, with the highest metronome speeds ever found in the field
anywhere, accelerating up to 900bpm in one of Picken's transcriptions.
English in former times I'm not sure about. The English were the first
people in the British Isles to use the fiddle for folk music, and if we
are to believe the illustrations in Playford's books from the 1650s, the
kind of fiddle they used was the kit. Did English kits of this period
have flattish or highly arched bridges? There must be surviving examples.
Not sure there any 17th century kits surviving that were definitely used
in Scotland, though the instrument must have got here.
=================== <http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/> ===================
Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To
subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
