> Is there a significant difference between the Scottish and the Irish > genres? I play Celtic Music (mainly Irish) on the hammer dulcimer and > play a lot of fiddle tunes, generally preferring the slip jigs and > tunes with a rhythmic or melodic twist...not much into waltzes and aires.
In some cases, the slip jigs and slow airs are the same tune - e.g. the Irish slip jig "The Rocky Road to Dublin" is just a speeded-up and regularized version of the very much older Lowland Scottish tune "Ay Waukin O" (notice how people often end "The Rocky Road" with the opening bar? - that's the refrain from the song). Anyway, audiences get mightily bored with fast music all the time. "Aire" with the olde-worlde "e" is tacky. Its only use in the old Scots tongue was in the context "justice aire", which meant a sitting of a circuit court, when the judge went round a district doing trials as a travelling roadshow. > My library includes O'Neill's. Would anyone want to suggest some neat > Scottish tunes from that book. I would suggest getting a book of Scottish tunes instead. The nearest equivalent to an O'Neill for Scottish music is Kerr's "Merry Melodies" from the 1880s - four volumes of it, in all somewhat bigger. It's not very expensive. Get it from Fiddler's Crossing. What neither O'Neill nor Kerr has is a significant number of Highland pipe tunes. These are very widely played these days on all sorts of instruments. Unfortunately you get what you pay for: the collections used by pipers are far better and more comprehensive than the adaptations used by fiddlers and accordionists, but be prepared for sticker shock. Many are published by British Army regiments and you'd think they were using them as a fundraiser to buy tanks. Many pipe tunes - or Scottish tunes in general - will work better on a hammered dulcimer than typical Irish material. If there's one single characteristic that distinguishes Scottish from English and Irish styles, it's that the Scots use arpeggios where the English and Irish use scales; very often, an entire bar will only contain notes from one common chord. On an instrument with uncontrollable sustain, arpeggios are a lot easier on the ear. Also, I'd suggest listening to the webcast of BBC Radio Scotland's "Take the Floor" programme. This is a weekly programme of Scottish dance music; it takes very few risks but will tell you in no uncertain terms what the right timing for a lot of Scottish dances is. It will also tell you how sets of tunes are put together; you often find the same kind of sets in pub sessions, albeit some Take the Floor bands delight in playing their own material to the exclusion of anything any other player might recognize. After a while you'll hear which dances and which tunes keep recurring - they're the standard repertoire, you can filter out the rest. =================== <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
