Re: [scots-l] Blue-Bell polka (Siamsa Beirte)
In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>, <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > I asked on irtrad-l about what my notes said was Irish, and it turns > out to have originated (as far as anyone there knew) with Jimmy > Shand. So I thought I'd ask the experts over here ... The issue came up on the Strathspey list just the other day, and we found out that the Bluebell Polka can't be by Jimmy Shand because it is in Kerr's Collection which came out in 1875. (Jack Campin also points this out in his modes tutorial.) The actual composer was a chap called »F. Stanley«. Don't know whether he was Irish or Scots or something else again. Trivia department: If you look at the Strathspey Archive at http://www.tm.informatik.uni-frankfurt.de/strathspey/ you can also find a (more recent) set of lyrics. Anselm -- Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Blue-Bell polka (Siamsa Beirte)
John Chambers wrote: > I asked on irtrad-l about what my notes said was Irish, and it turns > out to have originated (as far as anyone there knew) with Jimmy > Shand. So I thought I'd ask the experts over here ... It didn't ORIGINATE with Jimmy Shand, but he made the tune popular to a huge extent, having taken it in to the hit parade. I have sheet music from the fifties which states that it was composed by F Stanley - I'll look it out later today. However, I also have a 78rpm disc by James Brown (no, not THAT James Brown; the Edinburgh melodeon player) from 1911 of a track called "Little Pet (Caledonian Polka)" which is the same tune. And, If I remember correctly, it can also be found in Kerr's Merry Melodies - hang on, I'll just have a look... Yes, Book 1, p51, with no composer credited. It's possible that this Stanley chap hijacked the tune, slapped an arrangement on it and claimed it as his own. If you happen to be a descendant of Frank Stanley, ignore that last sentence. As to your question "is it Irish?": can't say. It has certainly been popular in Scotland for more than 100 years, but that's no claim on its nationality. -- Nigel Gatherer, Crieff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Scottish Music Pages: http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/gatherer/scottish/index.html Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Scots Whistle Players
Blowing my own trumpet/whistle time The fine wee tin whistle got me started on this whole life of tunes Scoraig festival maybe 88 or 89, this wee lassie got up on stage inbetween all the mad bands and played whistle solo, and the crowd wouldnt let her leave, and the first thing i did when i got back to 'cilivisation' was buy one to accompany me on my travels. First tunes taught to me by an Oban man called George (the post) Crawford - more irish than the irish - and Connel fiddle player Anne Barlow (nee MacLaren) - a fine west coast drive. Still my first instrument and still a magic thing for playing Scots music. Oh and use that tongue for gods sake... Stephen McNally The Puffer Bar: http://www.pufferbar.com Stephen's Tunes: http://www.pufferbar.com/tunes Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Tune from Brenda Stubbert
John wrote: > I learned this jig from Brenda Stubbert this summer. At the time she > could not recall the name of it. It's very familiar but I couldn't > find it in any of my books or CD's. > > It's a cool tune to finish a G set with. > > Does anybody know it's name? Sounds like a variation on the Rakes of Kildare. Derek Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] RE: Glenties (cross-posted from Fiddle-L)
Ted wrote: > Looks like a great weekend. I'll certainly be heading > over. There are still a couple of spaces in the car > if anyone's interested. I'll be leaving Glasgow Friday pm, > returning Monday pm. It is a good do. It's not too big, more a kind of organised gathering. I went over 2 years ago and played in the concert with Ken Fraser and Annawendy Stevenson. It's the first time I've been over to an Irish music event playing Scottish music. It felt very good. Derek Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Blue-Bell polka (Siamsa Beirte)
> I asked on irtrad-l about what my notes said was Irish, and it turns > out to have originated (as far as anyone there knew) with Jimmy > Shand. So I thought I'd ask the experts over here ... > A friend asked me if I knew anything about the tune, and I didn't, > although I've played it for years. Any idea who may have written it, > or whether it's maybe "trad"? If the latter, is it Irish (as the > folk-dancers' notes seem to all say) or Scottish? It's in Kerr's "Merry Melodies" volume 1 of the early 1880s, not very different from the way Shand played it. I have once seen a composer attribution, and remember being surprised that it was a British name when I'd got it into my head that it was a Swedish tune, but I forget who or where. If it is in fact Scottish, it's one of the earliest Scottish tunes in that idiom. Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] string materials
> We're not sure about the pitch of voices in the past; one of your problems > with singing anything from 18th c Scottish MS is that the intended pitch is > at least one tone, maybe 1.5 tones, lower than the notation makes it appear, > due to the change in concert pitch to our higher 440=A tuning. The commonest pitch of the period was A=415 and there are thousands of surviving woodwind instruments at that pitch. A tone down was far less common; a few organs in continental Europe were built a tone above modern pitch. I don't think anything as low as A=400 was found anywhere except in France or after 1700. David Greenberg's A=415 fiddle sounds very convincing for music of this period. >> Was silk [for strings] usable in Scotland, or is it too sensitive to >> humidity? It could never have been very difficult to obtain. > Do you think that silk thread - raw strands, not spun, would have been > imported? Why not? It's light and easy to transport, so if there was a market for it a Chinese silk merchant could have got the same margin as on spun fibre simply by declaring it to be Special Musical-Grade AA Quality. Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Blue-Bell polka (Siamsa Beirte)
> It didn't ORIGINATE with Jimmy Shand, but he made the tune popular to a > huge extent, having taken it in to the hit parade. Jimmy Shand was a megastar in Ireland I believe. Derek Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Blue-Bell polka (Siamsa Beirte)
Derek Hoy wrote: > ...Jimmy Shand was a megastar in Ireland I believe... I have read both Shand biographies (which for some reason appear to be almost word-for-word identical), and I remember reading of huge crowds when Shand toured Ireland. I was also amused that (almost) no matter where they played, they always tried to get back to Dundee after the gig. That includes manchester, London, brighton, etc. I shouldn't imagine it was the same when they crossed to Ireland. -- Nigel Gatherer, Crieff <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> The Scottish Music Pages: http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/gatherer/scottish/index.html Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Blue-Bell polka (Siamsa Beirte)
Derek writes: | > It didn't ORIGINATE with Jimmy Shand, but he made the tune popular to a | > huge extent, having taken it in to the hit parade. | | Jimmy Shand was a megastar in Ireland I believe. Indeed. And it sounds like the common dance that's done to this tune most likely appeared after his recording. This wouldn't be at all unusual; it's quite common for the folk-dance crowd to adopt someone's choreographed dance to a hit tune. A generation later, it's a "traditional" dance. Anyway, thanks for all the info on the tune. I was pretty sure that this gang would come through. I've duly copied the info into the B: and D: lines of my ABC files. The "Merry Melodies" reference probably insulates the ABC from any charges of copyright infringement, too. The only thing that's missing now is the citation for the Jimmy Shand recording. But I can probably find the recording in the collections of the local dance groups. Of course, liner notes and labels are notoriously lax in unimportant details like dates ... (I did check with the big search engines, and found references to the dance/tune on several music industry web sites. None of them gave any information whatsoever about the tune, other than the fact that they had a recording for sale. Typical. ;-) Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] string materials
| | >> Was silk [for strings] usable in Scotland, or is it too sensitive to | >> humidity? It could never have been very difficult to obtain. | > Do you think that silk thread - raw strands, not spun, would have been | > imported? | | Why not? It's light and easy to transport, so if there was a market for | it a Chinese silk merchant could have got the same margin as on spun fibre | simply by declaring it to be Special Musical-Grade AA Quality. In some things that I've read about the opening of trade with the East in the 1200's, silk is one of the important topics. While most silk seems to have been shipped as cloth, some was shipped as thread. Strings for musical instruments is one of the standard explanations of this. Silk strings are quite traditional (if expensive) in most of the Middle East and eastern Europe. Given their strength, durability and sound quality, finding them as far west as the British Isles wouldn't be the least bit surprising, even before shipping from China was routine. While silk cloth may have been too expensive for the common man, silk strings use relatively little silk and last for years, so the expense wouldn't have been all that big a deal. Anyone who plays with silk strings knows of silk's sensitivity to humidity. You really want to arrive at least half an hour early and open the case, to let the strings adjust to the conditions, and then do your tuning. You want to do this with any string instruments made of wood, of course, but it's even more important with silk strings. There was a cute example of the strength and water-sensitivity of silk in the recent movie "Shanghai Noon". This is a spoof western, with Jackie Chan playing the leading role of Chon Wang (similarity to "John Wayne" not at all an accident), a Chinese soldier posing as an immigrant to find a captured princess. Much of the humor is based on the "Stranger in a Strange Land" scenario. He and the other lead male character (Owen Wilson playing a sensitive, new-age bandit) are in jail at one point. Chon Wang takes off his silk shirt, moistens it with their urine, and uses a short bar that's available by some coincidence to wrap it tightly around the cell's bars. They then wait for it to dry, causing it to shrink and bend the iron bars together enough so that one of them can slip out. It's all rather slapstick, and very funny. Despite being a comedy and satire, I've seen reviews of the movie that comment on it's being one of the rare cases of a movie that accurately depicts the history of oriental immigrants in the American West. Racism is rife in the movie, on both sides, and is a real part of the humor. The silk bit is also an example of unusual technical accuracy. Oriental soldiers have worn silk shirts for ages, for a good reason. While an arrow might penetrate the outer clothing, even if it's armored, an arrowhead usually won't cut the silk. So you can grab the shirt and pull the arrow out. The silk will have blunted the arrow's edge and retarded its penetration. You still have a serious puncture wound, but it's not a cutting wound. With a little forced bleeding to flush it out, your chances of survival are far greater than with any other cloth. Chon Wang, being a Chinese soldier, would have been wearing his military-issue silk shirt at all times. Slowly wandering off-topic ... Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[scots-l] BOUNCE scots-l@: Non-member submission from [Ted Hastings] (fwd)
-- Forwarded message -- Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 08:26:43 -0700 Subject: BOUNCE scots-l@:Non-member submission from [Ted Hastings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>] >From [EMAIL PROTECTED] Wed Sep 27 08:26:43 2000 Received: from mondrian.jameswatt.ac.uk (root@[194.247.79.46]) by argyll.wisemagic.com (8.9.3/8.9.3) with ESMTP id IAA20173 for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Wed, 27 Sep 2000 08:10:16 -0700 Received: from jameswatt.ac.uk ([10.10.10.134]) by mondrian.jameswatt.ac.uk (8.9.3/8.9.3/SuSE Linux 8.9.3-0.1) with ESMTP id QAA06188 for <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>; Wed, 27 Sep 2000 16:26:40 GMT Message-ID: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Date: Wed, 27 Sep 2000 16:18:58 +0100 From: Ted Hastings <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Reply-To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] X-Mailer: Mozilla 4.7 [en] (Win95; I) X-Accept-Language: en MIME-Version: 1.0 To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: [scots-l] RE: Glenties (cross-posted from Fiddle-L) References: <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Derek Hoy wrote: > > Ted wrote: > > Looks like a great weekend. I'll certainly be heading > > over. There are still a couple of spaces in the car > > if anyone's interested. I'll be leaving Glasgow Friday pm, > > returning Monday pm. > > It is a good do. It's not too big, more a kind of organised gathering. > I went over 2 years ago and played in the concert with Ken Fraser and > Annawendy Stevenson. It's the first time I've been over to an Irish music > event playing Scottish music. It felt very good. Yes, I remember that. It went down well with the audience too. Karen Stevens was over last year and she received an excellent reception as well. Regards, Ted Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] string materials
>> We're not sure about the pitch of voices in the past; one of your problems >> with singing anything from 18th c Scottish MS is that the intended pitch is >> at least one tone, maybe 1.5 tones, lower than the notation makes it appear, >> due to the change in concert pitch to our higher 440=A tuning. > > The commonest pitch of the period was A=415 and there are thousands of > surviving woodwind instruments at that pitch. A tone down was far less > common; a few organs in continental Europe were built a tone above modern > pitch. I don't think anything as low as A=400 was found anywhere except > in France or after 1700. > > David Greenberg's A=415 fiddle sounds very convincing for music of this > period. Jack, if the pitch change was relatively small - a semitone or a touch more - why are we told that so many fiddles had to be rebuilt entirely to take the increased tension of the 'new' orchestral pitch in the early 1800s? I thought the general shift between 1750 and 1830 was about 1.25 tones. Northumbrian and Border pipes tuned about a quarter tone-below concert seem to have been current well into this century and one of my friends has a set he can only play unaccompanied, supposedly 1920s, and supposedly not a *mistake* but deliberate pitch. > >>> Was silk [for strings] usable in Scotland, or is it too sensitive to >>> humidity? It could never have been very difficult to obtain. >> Do you think that silk thread - raw strands, not spun, would have been >> imported? > > Why not? It's light and easy to transport, so if there was a market for > it a Chinese silk merchant could have got the same margin as on spun fibre > simply by declaring it to be Special Musical-Grade AA Quality. > > And distributed by Hornby Skewes, too... I can't help feeling that if silk had been used for instrument strings, we would have archaelogical evidence. One reason silk is so valuable is that it's almost as good as today's synthetic fabrics at resisting rotting, so strings or strands of it would still be around. Same would also apply to hair, horse or otherwise. I don't know if you have ever worked with silk. My wife has spun considerable amounts in the past. You don't have to export the thread, just the cocoons; it unwinds directly. The threats of very unpleasant death offered by the Chinese authorities to anyone caught attempting to smuggle silk cocoons - with or without live contents - would probably have prevented that. The raw thread is not actually very good for strings; the width out of the worm's spinerette may be constant, and the thread a predictable quality, but slubs are a natural feature of raw silk and require processing out (unless you want them, which Shirley normally does). I am not sure how this is done. A string with uneven thicknesses and lumps all over it would not be very useful. If it was used a) it would have been fully processed and your joke about Musical-Grade AA Quality is probably not a joke at all b) it would have been very expensive c) a broken string would never have been wasted, the thread would have been too useful for repairs or other purposes like stringing beads. Did the Chinese string their bows with silk? What did Pictish bowmen, or any mediaeval bowmen, string their bows with? Harps supposedly derive from bows, and I wonder if in any given country, the material commonly used for bowstrings might be the first readyily available stringing for instruments too. The only satisfactory answer to this one is to build a harp and string it with silk! Over to someone else on that one... David Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Tune from Brenda Stubbert
Derek - I wonder if you know a different version of the Rakes of Kildare. I know of the tune but don't play it. I just looked it up in both Ryan's and O'Neill's collections. The tunes written out there are quite different than the one I learned from Brenda. Though I must admit there's one measure that sounds vaguely familiar. Any other guesses? Thanks John > >Sounds like a variation on the Rakes of Kildare. > >Derek >Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - >To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: >http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html > > I learned this jig from Brenda Stubbert this summer. At the time she >> could not recall the name of it. It's very familiar but I couldn't >> find it in any of my books or CD's. >> >> It's a cool tune to finish a G set with. >> > Does anybody know it's name? Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
[scots-l] Scottish and/or Traditional Music in London or Battle
Hi all, I'm delurking for a moment to ask a possibly silly question. On Oct. 11 I'll be arriving in London. I'll be there for a day or so, and then will head south to Battle. I'll be there for a few days, when I'll (oddly enough) head back to London and fly home. So, I was wondering if anyone could suggest good venues for traditional music (particularly Scottish music) in London or down in Battle? Also, if any of you would like to meet a lurker, that's fine too. My (rather dormant) specialties are early American military field music (principally 18th century drumming) and 18th and 19th century work songs. Thanks, Tom Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] string materials
At 05:26 PM 9/27/2000 +0100, "David Kilpatrick" wrote: >>> We're not sure about the pitch of voices in the past; one of your problems >>> with singing anything from 18th c Scottish MS is that the intended pitch is >>> at least one tone, maybe 1.5 tones, lower than the notation makes it appear, >>> due to the change in concert pitch to our higher 440=A tuning. >> >> The commonest pitch of the period was A=415 and there are thousands of >> surviving woodwind instruments at that pitch. A tone down was far less >> common; a few organs in continental Europe were built a tone above modern >> pitch. I don't think anything as low as A=400 was found anywhere except >> in France or after 1700. >> >> David Greenberg's A=415 fiddle sounds very convincing for music of this >> period. > >Jack, if the pitch change was relatively small - a semitone or a touch more >- why are we told that so many fiddles had to be rebuilt entirely to take >the increased tension of the 'new' orchestral pitch in the early 1800s? I >thought the general shift between 1750 and 1830 was about 1.25 tones. I'm going to jump in here and try to answer this at least in part. There were actually *two* significant changes that happened, I believe, close to the same time. One certainly was a change in pitch. But some other changes to the design of the instrument were introduced in order to make it *louder*, to accommodate larger ensembles and larger concert halls. The most significant change was to increase the string length from the nut to the bridge. For this purpose, the bridge height was raised to where it is on the modern violin. The other change that was apparently made was to the length of the neck. As an example, one of the last times my husband and I were at our luthier's, he also showed us a couple of very old instruments that he thought had been reconstructed during that time; on both of those instruments, the scrolls had been spliced onto the necks, rather than the necks and scrolls being all one piece, which is what you normally see. His assessment was that the necks had been replaced in order to lengthen them slightly. Increasing the length of the strings alone would have increased the tension simply to maintain the same pitch, and thus would have required structural changes in the instrument to support it. I had an opportunity this summer to get a good look at David Greenberg's baroque violin, and there is a *noticeable* difference in the size of the bass bar and in the thickness of both the soundpost and the bridge, compared to a modern violin (they are smaller on the baroque violin.) I suspect that the top and back may be carved a bit thinner too, but maybe David could tell us that. :-) The effect of those differences in structure is that the baroque violin doesn't produce quite the volume that the modern violin does, but its sound is incredibly powerful; it has a fantastic dynamic range and responds to a much lighter touch. You have to keep in mind that a well-made violin of any type already treads a fine line between having the maximum amount of flexibility in the top and back, to allow them to vibrate as freely as possible, and being sturdy enough to withstand both the stresses of that vibration and the ten- sion of the strings. So, if it is well-designed for a specific setup, it won't take much of an increase in string tension to damage it. Wendy Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music & Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
