I think Ted Hastings wirte this, it was in HTML and the result was I couldn't quoted material from reply.
> Most Irish tunes are in D or G, whereas many Scottish tunes > (particularly those derived from the highland pipes) are in A. What's happening here seems mainly to be a consequence of the different pitch of the Irish and Scottish pipes. Irish pipes are pitched somewhere near a flute, with D at the bottom and going up more than aoctave from there. Scottish pipes have an A near the bottom and don't quite go up as far. Which means Scottish tunes tend to be in A with the home keynote at the bottom or in D with the home keynote in the middle while Irish tunes are in D with the home keynote at the bottom or in G with the home keynote in the middle. This is reflected in the design of instruments like the melodeon - D/A for Scottish music, G/D for Irish music. (English music is less standardized, being more local and less literate, but you often find C/G there). At any rate, it helps to think of folk traditions as being predominantly in a *pair* of keys related like that. Try the wrong instrument for the idiom with only one of the pair of keys matching and you keep getting run off the ends. > One obvious way of finding outwould be to check the tunes against > Fleishmann's "Sources of Irish Traditional Music", which would give > an indication of where a tune was first published. However, this > isn't always a reliable guide to the actual origin of the tune. No, it's rather sad, that. Fleischmann put a phenomenal amount of work into it but didn't live to debug it properly. Wish I could afford one anyway. =================== <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
