happy?
Abby Sale
The US navy & Merchant Marine end flogging= 9/28/1850
He was a New York tailor
Ranzo, boys, Ranzo!
Shanghai'd aboard a whaler
Ranzo, me boys, Ranzo!
They gave him lashes thirty
Because he was so dirty.
They gave him lashes twenty
That's twenty more than plenty
Ranzo nearly fainted
When his back with oil was painted
"Reuben Ranzo," a long-drag shanty.
[Far as I’ve found, American songs dealing with flogging seem pretty rare
compared to a fairly large number of British/Australian ones that do deal
with it. The DigTrad version of this is a particularly good one.]
Copyright Abby Sale, 1997. All publication rights are retained by author,
but limited broadcast license will probably be granted on request.
Chris Ryall
>
>[Far as I致e found, American songs dealing with flogging seem pretty rare
>compared to a fairly large number of British/Australian ones that do deal
>with it.
horses). Especially in the British *Royal* Navy by all accounts.
-- Chris
"When his eyes, and teeth they did hang towards me
With his hands and feet bound down likewise
It was with me tarry, tarry rope I killed him
Because I wouldn't hear his cries"
or
"Wasn't that most cruel usage
Without a friend to interpose
How they whipped and mangled; gagged and strangled
The British sailor Andrew Rose".
--
Chris Ryall, Wirral UK (please remove eyes from deiimon to email)
Abby Sale
The 1st public appearance of bobbies (ie Metropolitan Police or Scotland
Yard) was on 9/29/1829
Now I'm living in style off me ill-gotten gains.
Scotland Yard have not caught me for all their fine brains.
Some people may tell you that crime does not pay,
But with me it worked out just the opposite way.
"The Ballad Of Pat Brady," Don Minifie; DigTrad filename[ PATBRADY
J.J.Farrell
In article <cUd$JuAjbs...@cavendish.demon.co.uk>,
Chris Ryall <ch...@cavendish.deiimon.co.uk> wrote:
>
>I suspect we did flogging rather better than they did (not just dead
>horses). Especially in the British *Royal* Navy by all accounts.
>
> With his hands and feet bound down likewise
> It was with me tarry, tarry rope I killed him
> Because I wouldn't hear his cries"
... but he was Captain of a merchantman, and got hanged for his efforts!
--
My opinions; I do not speak for my employer.
pdraper
Pray tell us what Messrs Wilton & Berge have to do with the text you
snipped. I can't see either name in the thread.
BTW, there's nothing about *spanking* in the thread.
ghost <j...@endor.harvard.edu> wrote in article
<611sv5$d...@necco.harvard.edu>...
> >Chris Ryall <ch...@cavendish.deiimon.co.uk> wrote:
> >>I suspect we did flogging rather better than they did (not just dead
> >>horses). Especially in the British *Royal* Navy by all accounts.
>
> Is it possible that Peter Wilton & Eric Berge are both graduates of this
> fine school, the British Royal Navy?
>
> These sickos get about as enthusiastic as you can get in print about
> something they like to refer to (Wilton, with a bunch of "!!!!!"s) as
> "spanking".
>
> Heavily into S they surely must be, but as I'm not into M & can't oblige
> them perhaps someone could get them to reinlist. Or something.
>
> Just trying to help.
>
Peter Wilton
ghost <j...@endor.harvard.edu> writes
>Is it possible that Peter Wilton & Eric Berge are both graduates of this
>fine school, the British Royal Navy?
Peter Wilton is decidedly anti-militaristic, thanx.
>These sickos
Gratuitous abuse. This does not advance an argument of any kind, and
suggests you have nothing to discuss. It might, however, be an
appropriate term to describe someone who is regularly offensive about
other people and the things that they love and which move them.
>get about as enthusiastic as you can get in print about
>something they like to refer to (Wilton, with a bunch of "!!!!!"s) as
>"spanking".
...a term richly descriptive of the effect of your words.
>Heavily into S they surely must be, but as I'm not into M & can't oblige
>them perhaps someone could get them to reinlist. Or something.
But the above, and the personality you constantly express, might suggest
a degree of "S". The meaning of sexuality for me, such as it is, is much
more akin to the "rapture" I feel when I'm alone in a beautiful landscape,
something I've kept from the childhood "rapture" of which Wordsworth
writes. But I wouldn't expect you to understand anything of that at all.
>Just trying to help.
Far from it. The only reason I've read this contribution is that you've
cross-posted to umf, where you have not been kill-filed. This will be done
forthwith.
--
Peter Wilton
The Gregorian Association Web Page:
http://www.beaufort.demon.co.uk/chant.htm
Greg Bullough
In article <cUd$JuAjbs...@cavendish.demon.co.uk> Chris Ryall <ch...@cavendish.deiimon.co.uk> writes:
>>with it.
>horses). Especially in the British *Royal* Navy by all accounts.
The British Navy had a different set of problems than did the
American Navy. They were strained for personnel between 1750
and 1850 and thus 'pressed' (we call it 'drafted') all manner
of unwilling conscripts, many of questionable character. Bringing
them into line and keeping them in line in the absence of a shore-side
penal system was a nightmare. Which is why it seems that all of
the Articles of War seem to have concluded with '...shall suffer
death.'
It isn't like there was a lot of space on those vessels for
a confinement of miscreants. In fact, it is from flogging that
we get the phrase 'not enough room here to swing a cat.' When
all hands were mustered on deck 'to witness punishment' it
was so crowded that it might be difficult for the bosun to
swing the cat o' nine tails without whacking the wrong chap.
Also, from the practice, we have the phrase 'the cat is out
of the bag' as the 'cat' was kept in a traditional bag in
a safe place. Hence it meant that there was going to be
trouble. Only later did it get transformed into meaning
that some secret was now out.
Flogging was less common on merchant vessels (of which the
Maryanne of 'Andrew Rose' fame was one) not because corporal
punishment was unheard of. But rather, because they lacked
the staid formality of the British Navy. Blows were delivered
by a kick, a whack with a rope-end, or a smack with a belaying
pin. Naval officers ruled by strength of law; merchant officers
by main toughness and loyalty by the bosun's mates to the
officers.
The US Navy was a considerably looser affair until the turn-of-the
20th century. At some levels, it was more like a merchant fleet.
Greg
ghost
In article <01bccfd1$05dcc440$7d07a8c2@rover> "pdraper" <pdr...@baig.co.uk> writes:
>Pray tell us what Messrs Wilton & Berge have to do with the text you
>snipped. I can't see either name in the thread.
> BTW, there's nothing about *spanking* in the thread.
Easily done.
There was this exchange, a few days ago, on the
"Christmas Folk Songs" thread
(which thread Mssrs Berge & Wilton have unaccountably accredited to trolls;
Christmas Folk trolls, maybe?):
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
---------------------------------------------------------------------------
From edb...@spambegone.ibm.net Tue Sep 30 00:21:56 EDT 1997
Article: 114123 of rec.music.folk
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk
Date: Mon, 29 Sep 97 19:11:25
From: Eric Berge <edb...@spambegone.ibm.net>
Subject: Troll (Re: Christmas Folk Songs?)
<some bergian gibberish deleted -jmf>
I'm not sure what prompted this even-more-than-usually strange troll from
you, lady - did Pete Wilton give you a net.spanking on another newsgroup as
well? Good for him.
<some more bergian gibberish deleted -jmf>
Ya know, every time I read one of your posts, I get just a little more
appreciation for the wisdom of our forbears, who put fruitcakes like yourself
on display for the amusement of the mob, rather than wasting everyone's
time on useless therapy.
<It would appear at this point Berge is adovocating public execution
by stone-throwing, I guess with him throwing the 1st one;
it might be he "just" advocates the public display & physical torture
of the mentally unfortunate (such as himself?) though; hard to tell from
the phrasing. --jmf>
Eric Berge
edb...@ibm.net
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
And then Wilton responded with:
----------------------------------------------------------------------
----------------------------------------------------------------------
From pj...@beaufort.demon.co.uk Tue Sep 30 09:46:12 EDT 1997
Article: 114138 of rec.music.folk
From: Peter Wilton <pj...@beaufort.demon.co.uk>
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk
Subject: Re: Troll (Re: Christmas Folk Songs?)
Date: Tue, 30 Sep 1997 14:15:26 +0100
Organization: Bass-baritone/Musicologist
Distribution: world
Eric Berge <edb...@spambegone.ibm.net> writes
>I'm not sure what prompted this even-more-than-usually strange troll from
>you, lady - did Pete Wilton give you a net.spanking on another newsgroup as
>well? Good for him.
A net.spanking!!! Wonderful, wonderful, wonderful!!!
<some wiltonian gibberish deleted --jmf>
Thank you, Eric. Thank you, thank you, thank you. It has all made my
day!
--
Peter Wilton
The Gregorian Association Web Page:
http://www.beaufort.demon.co.uk/chant.htm
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------
If that isn't a (rather revoltingly public about a rather revolting
fixation, isn't he?) satisfied exponent of torture & maiming speaking,
I don't know what is.
But wait:
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
Article 114288 of rec.music.folk:
Newsgroups: rec.music.folk,uk.music.folk
Subject: Re: Flogging
Date: Fri, 3 Oct 1997 09:05:14 +0100
Organization: Bass-baritone/Musicologist
Distribution: world
But the above, and the personality you constantly express, might suggest
a degree of "S". The meaning of sexuality for me,
<more Wiltonian gibberish deleted -jmf>
<I was talking about your S-as-in-Sadistic personality as espoused in your
delighted response to Berge's suggestion of "spanking", but if you
want to go & tell us all about your S-for-sexuality instead, go right
ahead.....oh phooey, you did.
more wiltonian gibberish deleted here --jmf>
Far from it. The only reason I've read this contribution is that you've
cross-posted to umf, where you have not been kill-filed. This will be done
forthwith.
--
Peter Wilton
The Gregorian Association Web Page:
http://www.beaufort.demon.co.uk/chant.htm
------------------------------------------------------------------------
------------------------------------------------------------------------
We know see that Wilton is not only, lessee, a Bass-baritone Musicologist
into Gregorian Associations that involve Webs, & gets all excited about
the prospect of "spanking" people, but advocates *killing*, too.
hmm.
ghost
>Chris Ryall <ch...@cavendish.deiimon.co.uk> wrote:
>>I suspect we did flogging rather better than they did (not just dead
>>horses). Especially in the British *Royal* Navy by all accounts.
Is it possible that Peter Wilton & Eric Berge are both graduates of this
fine school, the British Royal Navy?
These sickos get about as enthusiastic as you can get in print about
something they like to refer to (Wilton, with a bunch of "!!!!!"s) as
"spanking".
Heavily into S they surely must be, but as I'm not into M & can't oblige
them perhaps someone could get them to reinlist. Or something.
Just trying to help.
Jeri Corlew
On 3 Oct 1997 04:40:05 GMT, j...@endor.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>
>Is it possible that Peter Wilton & Eric Berge...
>
>These sickos...
>
>Heavily into S they surely must be, but as I'm not into M & can't oblige
>them perhaps someone could get them to reinlist. Or something.
>
>Just trying to help.
Would you just PLEASE give it a rest?
If you would like to continue this slam-fest, please consider adding a
delusion that your modem is on in addition to the "everyone-is-out-to-get
-me" delusions.
I thought at one time that you actually contributed to these NG
discussions. I'd very much like to see that happen again. I don't
understand why you have to see people who disagree with you as enemies.
Jeri
Anti-Spam Alert
Please replace "nonet" with "inet" in my address when replying.
Peter Wilton
Greg Bullough <gr...@netcom.com> writes
>Also, from the practice, we have the phrase 'the cat is out
>of the bag' as the 'cat' was kept in a traditional bag in
>a safe place. Hence it meant that there was going to be
>trouble. Only later did it get transformed into meaning
>that some secret was now out.
I also understand that the phrase was originally "taking the cat out of the
bag". "Letting" presumably arose because people forgot what kind of cat
it was originally!
Eric Berge
In Article<3436d3d6...@news.inet.att.co.kr>, <jer...@nonet.att.co.kr>
writes:
> >I don't, generally speaking. Do you think my attitude toward
> >Hawes, Wilton, Berge et al could have something to do with their
> >insufferably twee way of speaking, & with you, Berge, Wilton & Bullough
> >could have something to do with your insufferable living-room
psychologizing?
> >Nah, you probably *couldn't* see that.
> >
> Hawes, Wilton & Berge - now the twee of you have to teach me the secret
> handshake.
Just say da magic woids: "I tought I taw a puddy-tat!".
Eric Berge
(remove "spambegone" for address)
ghost
In article <3435a3cc...@news.inet.att.co.kr> jer...@nonet.att.co.kr writes:
>I thought at one time that you actually contributed to these NG
>discussions. I'd very much like to see that happen again. I don't
>understand why you have to see people who disagree with you as enemies.
>
>Jeri
I don't, generally speaking. Do you think my attitude toward
Hawes, Wilton, Berge et al could have something to do with their
insufferably twee way of speaking, & with you, Berge, Wilton & Bullough
could have something to do with your insufferable living-room psychologizing?
Nah, you probably *couldn't* see that.
Note: When someone (like me) tells you in very clear & detailed terms
what's wrong with European classical styles of interpreting music, it
doesn't make much sense for you to characterize my detailed explanation
as "paranoid delusions", but I suppose you'll go on doing so, won't you?
Eric Berge
In Article<615p6o$f...@necco.harvard.edu>, <j...@deas.harvard.edu> writes:
> I don't, generally speaking. Do you think my attitude toward
> Hawes, Wilton, Berge et al could have something to do with their
> insufferably twee way of speaking,
My what? That's a first.
> Note: When someone (like me) tells you in very clear & detailed terms
> what's wrong with European classical styles of interpreting music, it
> doesn't make much sense for you to characterize my detailed explanation
> as "paranoid delusions", but I suppose you'll go on doing so, won't you?
You bet - starting with your paranoid delusion that a purely aesthetic choice
about what music to listen to or play is morally right or wrong.
Bottom line: You are a raving nut. The object of your idée fixe is quite
irrelevant, as is it's factual basis; you could just as well be obsessing
about declaring the sky to be blue, and spewing your bile onto people who
say things like "It's a grey day today".
Arguing with an obsessive crank like you wastes the time of the sane and
validates their loony fantasies by implicitly placing them on an equal
plane with the real world; Flat Earthers, Holocaust Deniers, and now you
should be treated with the contempt you all deserve.
ghost
In article <NEWTNews.875983810.31274.Eric_Berge@tirnanog> Eric Berge <edb...@ibm.net> writes:
>In Article<615p6o$f...@necco.harvard.edu>, <j...@deas.harvard.edu> writes:
>> I don't, generally speaking. Do you think my attitude toward
>> Hawes, Wilton, Berge et al could have something to do with their
>> insufferably twee way of speaking,
>My what? That's a first.
You lacking in vocabulary? It figures. Your ickety-cutesy-poo,
runny-nose-stuck-in-the-air speech-mannerisms. Does that help?
>> Note: When someone (like me) tells you in very clear & detailed terms
>> what's wrong with European classical styles of interpreting music, it
>> doesn't make much sense for you to characterize my detailed explanation
>> as "paranoid delusions", but I suppose you'll go on doing so, won't you?
>You bet - starting with your paranoid delusion that a purely aesthetic choice
>about what music to listen to or play is morally right or wrong.
When did I mention morals? Its clear, from the nature of your postings,
that *you* don't have any to speak of, but I'm sure there are plenty
European classical musicians around with sterling moral character.
Unfortunately morals don't cure their tin ears.
Get out from your nearest school library
"An Introduction to the Physics of Music" by Michael J. Moravcsik,
Professor of Physics, University of Oregon, published by The Solomon Press
1987.
This is a book that goes into quite a lot of detail about the physics of
music (hence the title) without giving the detailed mathematical proofs
that other books on the topic specialize in; it was written to fill in the
"English explanation" gap students in a course Moravcsik was teaching
on the subject complained about.
Especially read the chapter on "Pitch and Musical Scales", paying special
attention to the sections "Building the Scale" & "The Compromise".
Also look at the "Location of Energy" section of the chapter on
"String Instruments", paying special attention to the Fourier components
(harmonics) of a chosen string-length mapped out on pages 177-179.
Moravcsik doesn't go into detail about traditional musics of the world
because its his mission, as is the mission of most people writing books
on the subject, unfortunately, to explain why European classical music
works as music *at all*, but he does lay a good groundwork for
understanding how & why the natural harmonics are compromised by using a
tempered scale.
From the chapter "Pitch and Musical Scales":
"We see from that table [table 7.3 in the text] that by the time we
have built a diatonic major scale on each of the seven notes of the
original diatonic major scale, we have defined 19 notes, including the
two anchor points of the octave. And, that is not the end of it; if we
wanted to be consistent, we would now have to build diatonic scales on each
of the 11 new notes also, thus undoubtably creating more notes in the
process. Soon the interval within the octave would be jammed with dozens
of notes.
One might ask what difference that makes. The main difficulty with such
an army of notes arises with regard to musical instruments on which the
pitches of playable notes are fixed. (Not all commonly used instruments
are in that category; for example, those in the violin family are not.
But most woodwinds are, as is the piano.)
We have arrived at a crisis: The *two eminently reasonable requirements*
--namely, the simple fraction criteria (to assure consonance) and the
requirement that all notes should be on an equal footing from the point of
view of being able to build a diatonic scale on them (which we call the
equal footing criterion)--*are incompatible with each other*. We cannot
satisfy both of them simultaneously, and so we must compromise."
End quoted material.
His next section is entitled "The Compromise", in which he details one
popular tempering scheme.
The point I make is that you don't have to compromise if you're singing
acapella music, because you're not using a fixed-note instrument.
And you don't have to compromise if you're using a fixed note-instrument
as long as the people playing along with you have instruments fixed to the
same family of harmonics, or are playing tunable instruments (unfretted
stringed instruments, voices); in other words, unless you're bent on
changing key within pieces of music or from piece to piece, there is no need
for traditional musicians to use tempering schemes, & before this
century, when they were flooded with the availabilty of mass-produced
instruments built on the European classical system, they didn't.
Do you want to write Moravcsik & tell him what a looney you think he is?
I'm sure the University of Oregon or The Solomon Press could provide you with
his address.
Jeri Corlew
On 4 Oct 1997 16:00:24 GMT, j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>In article <3435a3cc...@news.inet.att.co.kr> jer...@nonet.att.co.kr writes:
>>I thought at one time that you actually contributed to these NG
>>discussions. I'd very much like to see that happen again. I don't
>>understand why you have to see people who disagree with you as enemies.
>>
>>Jeri
>
>I don't, generally speaking. Do you think my attitude toward
>Hawes, Wilton, Berge et al could have something to do with their
>insufferably twee way of speaking, & with you, Berge, Wilton & Bullough
>could have something to do with your insufferable living-room psychologizing?
>Nah, you probably *couldn't* see that.
>
Hawes, Wilton & Berge - now the twee of you have to teach me the secret
handshake.
OK, "living-room psychology" aside, I find it a little odd that you would
choose to attack someone in a thread merely because they posted there. No
discussion of music (since when is that required) or ideas - just a
personal slam. It doesn't take a psychology degree to conclude that when
someone responds to thread on the musical history of flogging with
speculation on the sexual tendencies of group members, something is a
little weird (Twilight Zone music here).
>Note: When someone (like me) tells you in very clear & detailed terms
>what's wrong with European classical styles of interpreting music, it
>doesn't make much sense for you to characterize my detailed explanation
>as "paranoid delusions", but I suppose you'll go on doing so, won't you?
I find it annoying that any mention of "early music" groups consistently
provokes a lengthy rant on the evils of these groups and the individuals in
them based on your own personal experiences. I haven't had any of these
experiences myself, but you seem to think your opinions are more worthy
than mine.
When you tell me what's wrong with European classical styles of
interpreting music, it's an opinion, not a fact. Perhaps I'm not
understanding your intent correctly, but from my point of view you seem to
present your opinions *as* fact.
That's it for me - I'm outta here!
Peter Wilton
Jeri Corlew <jer...@nonet.att.co.kr> writes
>Hawes, Wilton & Berge - now the twee of you have to teach me the secret
>handshake.
Presumably any way of speaking other than ghost's particular brand of
American is "insufferable" (objectively, of course), just as with musical
styles other than the ones held out to be the only valid ones. And of
course, an academic manner of writing about music is "obviously" not
acceptable. How she must despise all the people in close working
proximity to her!
ghost
In article <94hyfKA$F6N0...@beaufort.demon.co.uk> Peter Wilton <pj...@beaufort.demon.co.uk> writes:
>Jeri Corlew <jer...@nonet.att.co.kr> writes
>>Hawes, Wilton & Berge - now the twee of you have to teach me the secret
>>handshake.
>
>Presumably any way of speaking other than ghost's particular brand of
>American is "insufferable" (objectively, of course),
And when did I say that? You're misrepresenting me again.
>just as with musical
>styles other than the ones held out to be the only valid ones.
This is rec.music.folk, not
rec.music.peter.wilton.thinks.its.a.valid.style
>And of
>course, an academic manner of writing about music is "obviously" not
>acceptable. How she must despise all the people in close working
>proximity to her!
Duh....I'm not working in the music department, I'm working (clerically,
I want to make clear) in the Division of Engineering & Applied Physics.
If they *were* into writing about music here (they tend instead to be writing
about subjects of which huge sums of grant money are given towards research,
& music isn't such a subject just yet) I'm sure they'd do it "academically"
in a manner of which their peers, of which I am not one, would approve.
Greg Bullough
In article <6175d9$p...@necco.harvard.edu> j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>
>I knew without even saying it that *Bullough* would prove to be the font
>of information on the actual practise of flogging in the British Navy.
Why, thank you. I'm glad to hear that you credit me with knowing a
bit about maritime history. Did you learn anything, or perhaps
overcome some of your pre-judgements?
To learn more, one could do worse than to look up Patrick O'Brien's
Jack Aubrey novels. The author has a remarkable understanding of
what Royal Navy officers where up against. He manages over the
course of a few volumes to be quite circumspect about role of
corporal punishment as a solution or non-solution.
As to what to do about 'ghost,' sailors take a lesson from Odysseus:
don't look 'ghost' in the face, lest we call the thing that is rarely
seen at sea: masons.
Greg
George Hawes
gr...@netcom.com (Greg Bullough) wrote:
<interesting stuff snipped>
>Flogging was less common on merchant vessels
> Blows were delivered by a kick, a whack with a rope-end, or a smack with a belaying
>pin.
A practice which continued 'til very recently. Listen to the Sam
Larner inserts on the original 'Shoals of Herring' on the
Singing the Fishing radio ballad.
G.
George Hawes
j...@endor.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>Just trying to help.
There's a first time for everything - or so I'm told!
G.
George Hawes
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>Wilton, I think, is actually more adept at flogging recordings, which he
>gets a big profit from,
Not at ukp 7 a CD he doesn't. (I think that was the price) And I
don't recall him selling it on here, but perhaps I missed that
post.
(uk.m.f. snipped from To: list)
G.
George Hawes
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>In article <NEWTNews.875983810.31274.Eric_Berge@tirnanog> Eric Berge <edb...@ibm.net> writes:
>>In Article<615p6o$f...@necco.harvard.edu>, <j...@deas.harvard.edu> writes:
>>> I don't, generally speaking. Do you think my attitude toward
>>> Hawes, Wilton, Berge et al could have something to do with their
>>> insufferably twee way of speaking,
You've heard us all speak? Yippee! I've met a ghost. Shame I
didn't realise it at the time.
>>My what? That's a first.
>You lacking in vocabulary? It figures. Your ickety-cutesy-poo,
>runny-nose-stuck-in-the-air speech-mannerisms. Does that help?
It helps categorise yourself, my dear, deluded phantom. Nothing
more or less. Sad, really.
G.
Chris Ryall
ghost <j...@deas.harvard.edu> wrote:
>I've added rec.music.folk to the newsgroup list at the top because I
>can't respond directly to uk.music.folk as this system is not subscribed
>to the "uk" hierarchy. Not fair to post answers to my articles where I
>can't read them or respond to them, is it?
Don't know about that. What were you doing on uk.music.folk
in the first place? This has always been such a friendly place.
--
Chris Ryall (Perplexed bystander)
ghost
In article <gregEHL...@netcom.com> gr...@netcom.com (Greg Bullough) writes:
->Jack Aubrey novels. The author has a remarkable understanding of
->what Royal Navy officers where up against. He manages over the
Do post those traditional folk songs you've collected
(no fair writing your own) in favor of press-ganging.
Filling the remainder of your ship's berths from the prisons of course
also guarantees happy & avid workers for your sailors.
Timothy Jaques
ghost <j...@deas.harvard.edu> wrote in article
<61bqsq$3...@necco.harvard.edu>...
>
> "The 'C' is wrong" is the complaint I read about most frequently from
> older Irish fiddlers when talking about the modern scale; do you suppose
> that is also true in Cape Breton (which, for those who don't know, is
> despite its French name mostly populated by people of Scottish descent
> who are said to be playing a form of Scottish music particularly faithful
> to the ways their forebears brought it to North America)?
Point of information, the French name for Cape Breton Island was Ile
Royale.
What is the name of the classical piece that sounds almost exactly like "Do
You Ken John Peel", and which is older, the folk tune or the classical
piece? I've heard the classical piece on CBC many times and not once have I
heard the presenter remark on the similarity.
Timothy Jaques tja...@netcom.ca
Windsor, Ontario, Canada
"Common sense is that set of prejudices we attain by the age of eighteen."
Eric Berge
(To the tune of "WE BE SOLDIERS THREE", From Thomas D'Urfey: "
Pills to Purge Melancholy, vol i." 1698 and 1707; Digital Tradition
filename SOLDIER3)
"Flogging the Troll", or, "Oh, Chwistmas Twee" **
We be folkies twee,
Pardonnez-moi, je vous en prie;
Hawes and Wilton and Bullough and me,
For never a penny of money.
Jay-em-eff, we contradict thee,
Pardonnez-moi, je vous en prie;
And all crackpots, wherever they be,
For never a penny of money.
When ghost reads this, will she be pissed?
Qui-est-ce qui s'en fiche, je vous en prie?; *
I think I'll by some more from Saydisc,
For several handfuls of money.
Ear-lee Music, music folkie,
Qui-est-ce qui s'en fiche, je vous en prie?;
I think I'll spin up another CD,
For never a penny of money.
* Colloquial French: "Who gives a damn, I pray you?"
**Further contributions welcome!
Eric Berge
In Article<616civ$k...@necco.harvard.edu>, <j...@deas.harvard.edu> writes:
> When did I mention morals?
'Round about the next sentence, you demented harpy.
> Its clear, from the nature of your postings,
> that *you* don't have any to speak of, but I'm sure there are plenty
> European classical musicians around with sterling moral character.
> Unfortunately morals don't cure their tin ears.
If they are hitting the notes they are aiming for, then their ears obviously
aren't tin. If they aren't hitting the notes you wish them to be aiming
for, that's another matter entirely.
> Get out from your nearest school library
> "An Introduction to the Physics of Music" by Michael J. Moravcsik,
> Professor of Physics, University of Oregon, published by The Solomon Press
> 1987.
(Irrelevant stuff snipped)
You don't get it. Oh, wait, what am I saying - of course you don't get it!
If you did, you wouldn't be the babbling crackpot we've all come to know
and... Well, that we've all come to know.
The _nature_ of your sick idée fixe is not at issue; no-one gives a rat's
ass about what it is that is obsessing you. What bothers people is the
fact that you _have_ a neurotic compulsion to spew bile on anything
that doesn't pass your ideological test.
You endless re-posting of 200+ lines of repetitious drivel reminds me
strongly of some of the stuff I've read by Nazi art critics from the 30s,
inveighing against "Degenerate Art", or their Stalinist counterparts
droning on about how only "Socialist Realism" is valid art.
ghost
In article <28...@purr.demon.co.uk> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>Another angle: Seumas MacNeill's measurements of Highland bagpipe tunings.
>It has been common knowledge for centuries that Highland pipes don't play
>in anything like either a just-intonation or 12-tone-equal-temperament
>scale. What MacNeill found was that in addition, looking at sets of pipes
>from a wide range of times and places, they didn't sound much like *each
>other*, either. No institution until the 19-century British Army needed
>to care about standardizing them; the result was even more anarchy than you
>get in the tuning of Indonesian gamelans. Further, this kind of weirdness
>crosses over to other instruments; while no fiddler will ever play in the
>same scale as a piper, trying to convey the effect of it is common enough in
>Cape Breton fiddling to force them to think up a new pitch class name - "C
>supernatural" - and that pitch is *not* there to make just-intonation triads.
>(Like Scotland in former times, Cape Breton has no tradition of ensemble
>playing, except for piano accompaniment. I would be surprised if any two
>Cape Breton fiddlers used exactly the same frequency for this; if they can
>play a quartertone sharp of their accompanist they can certainly ignore what
>the player they heard last week did).
"The 'C' is wrong" is the complaint I read about most frequently from
older Irish fiddlers when talking about the modern scale; do you suppose
that is also true in Cape Breton (which, for those who don't know, is
despite its French name mostly populated by people of Scottish descent
who are said to be playing a form of Scottish music particularly faithful
to the ways their forebears brought it to North America)?
What I want to know is whether the people discussing these tunings actually
measured the ratios of the subsequent pitches to the "fundamental" (lowest
note), or whether they just described them as being sharp or flat with
regards to Western European tuning, just *or* tempered?
Its completely prejudicial to refer to music in a different system
as though it were trying to hit some mark in your favorite system, but
failing, & that's what calling things "sharp" or "flat" (or "low") does.
I've heard a fair amount of harmonized continental European folk music
from Germany & France, all harmonized along just-intoned (what I call
"untempered") pitches on the very familiar scale that has since taken
over the world.
Its fair to say that all these French & German harmony groups can & do
regularly hit true intervals on that scale that no "early-music" group
from the European classical camp can even get near. If you don't believe
it, get the records out. O.F.N.Y. & that group that just released
"Beupre's Home" (I'm blocking on their name), Chanterelle & about 100 other
French & French-Canadian groups all have harmonized songs traceable back
to the middle ages, The German group I'm referring to is on a casette of
religous songs called "Gesenbach Treasures"; I can look up ordering
information if anyone wants.
But back to Scottish pipers & Cape Breton fiddlers & their reportedly
oddball scales:
It makes no sense to refer to things that obviously aren't on a
Western European scale, even the "just" scale, by referring to that scale.
What I propose is that people just measure the pitch ratios of ascending
pitches in a scale to the lowest pitch, & take it from there.
I also propose that you write down scores, if you must, by working up
a graph based on the interval sizes in the system of music you're charting:
Pick a unit of measure that won't put you off your available paper, & draw
graph lines based on the ratios of pitches to the lowest pitch
(or chosen "fundamental" pitch, if you feel the piece is based around it
but know it will go below it). Then plot the tune out on those graph lines.
Put on your notes, then connect the dots.
It should be very easy to see "the curve (or angle) of the music" that way
(for those who can't *hear* it). It will be obvious when a piece of music
follows the curve of a related piece, but has gentler or sharpers peaks &
valleys & so forth; this way you can dismiss all those annoying
musicologists who insist that pieces of music aren't related because
one or two notes are in different places on the currently-used very
misleading music staff (I always used to think that those staff-lines being
equidistant meant that the notes should be equidistant; I couldn't usually
figure out how to do that, & when I did manage it the music I came up with
certainly didn't sound very good).
Just for fun you could chart out pieces of music from traditions using
different interval sizes, employing different colored ink for the different
traditions. This would show that even when you have different-sized
intervals in use, *some* notes on the scales for the differing traditions
*do* fall in the same places (at the same ratios-to-fundamental).
This is such a great idea I can't believe someone else hasn't thought of
it, which means they probably have & I just don't know their name(s).
For anyone following this from the late fasola list, I proposed this
a few years ago (not in so much detail) over there. An European classical
jackass chimed in in the last days of the list to sarcastically propose
a logarithmic graph, but a logarithmic graph wouldn't make much sense
unless you *are* charting only Western European scales & using Bach's
tempering scheme (based on the square-root of 12).
>more often he ended with single notes. This was somebody who well knew the
>art-music repertoire of his time; but he couldn't see what use its chords
>were to the Scottish idiom. And without triadic harmony, there is no point
>in just intonation and not much to indicate when you've got it right.
Like I said in the previous answer to this article, get your mind off
Bachian 3 & 4-note chords; someone playing just a 5th against a fundamental,
or playing octaves (as you describe in that section I just deleted too much of)
*is* harmonizing.
What would you call a piper playing against a drone, if not harmony?
Forget about it being "triadic harmony" or not.
The piper's in pretty big trouble if the drone isn't harmonic with the
rest of the notes with which its going to sound.
>Bottom line: flexible pitch does not imply just intonation; genre, at the
>gross level of "folk" vs "classical", has nothing to do with it either,
>with just intonation being a fairly uncommon, localized and ephemeral choice
>in both; and an instrument's ability to play just-intonation triads has
>always been a very peripheral reason for choosing it, in any form of music.
If you are going to harmonize, any kind of harmony (I've also been told
off-list, yet again, that if it isn't the kind of harmony Bach described
"it isn't harmony", in which case a lot of harmony groups I could name
[(Balkan, South African, Polynesian, Appalachian, French, you name it],
& their audiences, had better be instructed to change their evil ways
by these same know-it-alls), you have to pick notes to harmonize on
that will be perceived by you & whomever's listening as going together.
I maintain that picking ratios to your designated "fundamental" or "ground"
pitch that fall in the same harmonic family will guarantee that.
But if people won't believe that & I can't find a print reference,
go & test it yourself.
If you are not going to harmonize, it doesn't matter so much whether
your scale notes, or any ornamentations around them, go together
harmonically, unless you're playing an instrument with such a long sustain
on its notes that you're harmonizing inadvertently.
>One final remark about "ghost"'s rather strange musical sectarianism. This
>has little parallel in the history of Scotland, mainly for economic reasons.
>The US has always been a far richer society than ours; the result has been
>that music there has far more fixed and stratified structure. Very few
>classically-trained musicians in Scotland have ever been able to make a
>living from that genre alone; the result is that they have supplemented their
>income by playing in dance bands, and anyone wanting to put on a large-scale
>classical work would have to both scratch together such foreign professionals
>as were available (for exotic instruments like the trumpet) and fill up the
>back desks with dance fiddlers. The result is very well documented in the
>Scottish repertoire of all periods; art-music pieces and folk tunes have been
>printed or hand-copied side by side for as long as we have any record of our
>musical tradition, and every musically competent foreign immigrant has played
>their part in continuing the stream of Scottish music. The US experience is
>totally different; no orchestral musician from Vienna would look for work in
>a New York bar when there was a symphony orchestra going, and the geography
>of your predominantly rural society meant that no Appalachian folk fiddler
>could ever dream of playing in the Boston Philharmonic. Result: mutual
>incomprehension and contempt between performers and aficionados of the two
>genres, of exactly the kind "ghost" is exemplifying, and all kinds of oddball
>schoolmarmy rules of etiquette about when and how one genre can use materials
>from the other, of exactly the kind she wants to impose. Don't generalize
>these ossified local class divisions to us, please.
Tell you what: Don't try to fool the world into believing that today's
Scottish orchestral musicians or Scottish European classical singers
venture into the folk realm to play ceilis or sing with folk groups, Okay?
Don't do that & we won't send Jeannie Morrell (Boston-area atrocity),
who thinks she's a folk-type singer of Scottish songs (& even gives lessons
in it!) over to sing at you. You haven't died the death of a thousand cuts
(flogging thread reference) til you've heard this monstrosity on a Burns song.
And its a lot more than geography that kept, & keeps Appalachian fiddlers
from playing for the Boston Symphony Orchestra (that's what they call it,
not "Philharmonic"). Its a whole different playing style, & was
a different tuning style as well for the oldest & best
(such as Edn & Burl Hammons, French Carpenter).
This didn't keep Aaron Copland from stealing outright William Stepp's
arrangement for Bonaparte's Retreat & dropping it into one of Copland's
many classical opii that employed "folk themes" (I think "Appalachian Spring")
completely uncredited. Unless of course you think the difference between
just & tempered tuning is enough to make an arrangement copyrightable, or,
better yet, pretend the tune is your original composition, which is exactly
what Copland did.
They discuss this every so often on rec.music.country.old-time.
ghost
In article <NEWTNews.876188404.24585.Eric_Berge@tirnanog> Eric Berge <edb...@spambegone.ibm.net> writes:
>In Article<616civ$k...@necco.harvard.edu>, <j...@deas.harvard.edu> writes:
>> When did I mention morals?
>'Round about the next sentence, you demented harpy.
Gosh, Dumbo, you went & quoted an article that I wrote in answer to
*your* article in which I pointed out that you were the only one
who had mentioned morals. Which I had no need to until *you* brought
the subject up.
Perhaps you're receiving my answers to them before you write your articles?
That would be no mean feat, even for me.
>If they are hitting the notes they are aiming for, then their ears obviously
>aren't tin.
They are aiming for notes that are completely out-of-tune, in any
traditional system you want to go by. And this *is* rec.music.folk,
meaning "folk music & its fellow-travelers", at least to me.
Your tin-eared friends (why do I suspect you're a tin-ear yourself?) belong
in rec.music.classical, rec.music.early, rec.music.choral.
Since you claim you never post to those groups, I thought I'd point them
out to you. Surely you don't belong in alt.music.jewish, which you say you
post to. I'd rather read all the spam that hits that group than
classical music recommendations.
>> Get out from your nearest school library
>> "An Introduction to the Physics of Music" by Michael J. Moravcsik,
>> Professor of Physics, University of Oregon, published by The Solomon Press
>> 1987.
>The _nature_ of your sick idée fixe is not at issue; no-one gives a rat's
>ass about what it is that is obsessing you.
*You* seem to be, uh, what's the word? Oh yeah, *obsessed* with commenting
completely meaninglessly on my every post.
Why do I suspect you probably paid somebody to take the math & science
sections of your college entrance exams for you? You & several other
people I can think of.
Peter Wilton
George Hawes <George...@i-cubed.co.uk> writes
>Not at ukp 7 a CD he doesn't. (I think that was the price) And I
>don't recall him selling it on here, but perhaps I missed that
>post.
No I didn't actually. I make a profit from the ones I sell, but I will still
make a loss overall, because they were produced as "business cards".
That might lead to making some money that otherwise I wouldn't have,
but it will be hard to judge.
ghost
> ghost <j...@deas.harvard.edu> wrote in article
><61bqsq$3...@necco.harvard.edu>...
->> What I want to know is whether the people discussing these tunings
->actually
->> measured the ratios of the subsequent pitches to the "fundamental"
->(lowest
->> note), or whether they just described them as being sharp or flat with
->> regards to Western European tuning, just *or* tempered?
>I don't want to take issue with any of the other points in this discussion
>of tuning, scales and pitches but I would like to point out the the lowest
>note on an instrument is not necessarily the right one to measure relative
>pitch from.
I said that later on in my article, in a section you've deleted:
That in a piece of music you pick as your "fundamental"
the tone you feel the piece is centered around, even though
the tune itself may go lower.
>On the Highland pipes I believe that the lowest note is
>actually the 'leading note' of the scale ie. the one below the tonic ( to
>use the terminology I learned at school). This is a very useful note to
>have.
You're missing the point that the concept of "leading tones" is taken
from the kind of harmony Bach developed & has nothing to do with music
played on the Highland pipes.
Everytime I borrow one of your Bachian terms to describe something I fall
into the same pit that you do; "fundamental" or "tonic" conjure up a form
of harmony that has nothing to do with British & Celtic music.
pdraper
Timothy Jaques <tja...@netcom.ca> wrote in article
<01bcd328$d0689a40$5f58b5cf@default>...
>
> --
> Timothy Jaques tja...@netcom.ca
> Windsor, Ontario, Canada
> "Common sense is that set of prejudices we attain by the age of
eighteen."
>
> ghost <j...@deas.harvard.edu> wrote in article
> <61cf9g$5...@necco.harvard.edu>...
> > According to a TV special on Cajun music compiled & narrated by Alan
> Lomax
> > that I saw a while ago, the Acadians didn't come from Brittany
> > (they were Huegonots?). So who knows where the term "Cape Breton"
comes
> > from?
>
> I think they came from Normandy, and some were Basques who jumped ship.
> They were not Huguenot, but Roman Catholic. I don't think the French
> allowed the settlement of Protestants in their North American
possessions.
>
> It is fully called "Cape Breton Island". There is actually a "Cape
> Breton" on the eastern side of the island, from which (presumably) the
> island got its English name.
>
>
I was recently in Brittany and according to the local histories many of the
Acadians returned to Brittany and settled on Belle Isle before going to
Louisiana. I presume that at least some of the settlers must have orginally
come from the area and returned to stay with relatives.
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>> j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
> This time check what *I* wrote. I've written in the past that different
> forms of traditional music use all kinds of different families of harmonics.
Or, like many of the styles I mentioned, intervals which have no explanation
in terms of harmonics of any rational order - for the good physical reason
that nothing about the way those styles make use of the instrument (or voice)
requires it.
> This is common knowledge among many traditional musicians of many different
> kinds of music, but I've gotten a lot of argument recently (off-list) over
> saying that Indonesian & Turkish music uses different-sized intervals than
> does Western European folk *&* classical music.
No argument about that, but they're radically different from each other.
Turkish classical music, and most of the Turkish folk music you will find
people writing about in either English or Turkish, uses the system set out
by al-Farabi in the Middle Ages, an extension of that of the Pythagoreans.
See Karl Signell's book _Makam: Modal Practice in Turkish Art Music_ for a
description of this. However, Turkish folk music does not always use quite
the same system; Picken's book on Turkish folk instruments gives some hints
about what's going on, but getting the story straight is an ethnomusicology
PhD topic for someone, there is very definitely *nothing* in the literature
that describes it adequately. (Modern Arabic music, at least as described
in the textbooks, radically simplifies the al-Farabi system into a 24-tone
equal-tempered scale, though I suspect that more sensitive players modify
this, particularly in ud solo music).
Indonesian music (which I alluded to in the post you're responding to) is
based around two scale *families*, pelog and slendro, but the exact pitch
sets are different in every gamelan (matched set of gongs and chimes). That
is, each village has its own double set of instruments, and its own version
of both the pelog and slendro scale to go with it. This is no accident; the
instrument builders take a great deal of care to make the scales individual
for each gamelan they make, and they can take a year or more to reach final
tuning adjustment. And there is no harmonic basis for *any* of the scales;
only the octaves are Pythogorean-accurate.
[ me on Gaelic psalm singing ]
>> (The one place you do find harmony in Scottish music is in the
>> psalm and hymn settings of the church; but these are even *more* a product
>> of the art music tradition than the piano is, and did not start to become
>> nativized into a folk idiom until about the same time that the piano also
>> became a folk instrument - and that only in the Western Isles, whereas the
>> piano got everywhere).
> Again, go buy & listen to the Greentrax recording of the Hebridean
> Gaelic psalm-singers. The custom of singing in their particular form
> of harmonization, which uses a lot more than melody-&-drone; in fact it
> sounds to me like sean-nos singing, harmonized goes back to the
> Protestant Reformation. That's 1600-something.
It's a lot later than that, and the story is much more complex than you're
suggesting. The first religious music of the Scottish Reformation was
adapted folk songs from the Eastern Lowlands, published in the _Gude and
Godlie Ballatis_ of around 1560 - some of these are still traceable, "John
come kiss me now" being one. The Kirk dropped these as soon as they got the
opportunity and they were entirely gone within a generation; they went over
to specially-composed monophonic psalm tunes from English, Huguenot and
Anglo-Swiss sources (some of which may have been composed by Scotsmen but
that was hardly seen as relevant to the choice). The texts for these were
all in English and not very good. The first usable set of Scottish metrical
psalm texts was published in 1611, with unison melodies. The first 4-part
settings date from 1625, and the final-for-a-good-long-time version of the
texts was published in 1635.
What happened next was a progressive _elimination_ of most of this music.
There were standard "common" tunes that suited a large proportion of the
metrical psalm texts, and the special-for-each-psalm tunes tended to drop
out of use. By the mid-18th century the Kirk was suggesting a repertoire
of only 21 tunes for all the Scots psalms. (The main force behind this
trend was that the Kirk would not allow a class of liturgical-music
specialists to develop - the result of leaving the musical education of
the congregation in the hands of the local blacksmith was understandably
that only a little of this basically alien music, with no link to anything
else sung or played in Scotland, could be preserved as a live tradition).
Gaelic psalmody started later - the first 50 Gaelic metrical psalm texts
were not published until 1659, and the next 100 in 1694. Without words to
sing, obviously there couldn't have been any Gaelic psalms before that.
Musically, Gaeldom went in for an even more extreme reduction of thematic
material than the Lowlands, ending up with exactly six psalm tunes by the
early nineteenth century.
Something else went along with the reduction of repertoire: reduction of
speed. By 1760, Robert Bremner (in Edinburgh, writing about Scots psalmody)
was recommending that semibreves should last for three seconds. It's not
surprsing what happened when people have to sing a very limited repertoire
very slowly: they start varying it. A lot. With melismas that multiplied
the note rate eight times. Bremner (here acting as the Kirk's musical
consultant) threw a fit; reading between the lines, he must have seen this
style as death to the market in hymnbooks, because nobody in Europe could
have notated what the Lowland Scots were doing to their psalms at the time.
And as a music publisher, he needed to do something about it. What he did
was reinvent the mass-produced 4-part harmonized hymnbook, with the force
of the Kirk saying "do it this way and no frills", and this time it stuck.
We now have no record of what the melismatic Lowland psalm style was like,
beyond horrified reviews by people who wanted to stamp it out, and whose
descriptions *closely fit the Gaelic psalm style of 100 years later*.
There is no account of Gaelic psalm singing that fits the stuff on the
Greentrax/School of Scottish Studies record until the 1840s. It must have
arisen somewhat earlier, but there is no doubt that a *very* similar style
had evolved in the Lowlands 100 years before the Gaels got started; and that
cannot have owed anything to sean-nos singing.
>> It has been common knowledge for centuries that Highland pipes don't play
>> in anything like either a just-intonation or 12-tone-equal-temperament
>> scale.
> The math tells you there are an infinite amount of possible harmonics.
> You're certainly not limited to a Western European diatonic (or chromatic)
> scale.
And the math here is quite useless. What just intonation gives you is a
distinctive sound *when playing harmonically*. Bagpipes are not played
harmonically (certain rather horrible 20th-century military experiments
aside) and a comma here or there makes no difference whatever to the effect.
Suppose you identify a particular pitch in the Royal Scots band as being, to
within measurement error, a 37th harmonic; what does that tell you about its
part in the overall sound? Nothing. Contrast Harry Partch's systems, which
go up to around the 11th harmonic and then stop; he *does* sound these high-
order pure harmonics together and a comma *does* make all the difference.
Only *low* harmonics are audible as such, and the higher they get the more
accuracy, pitch stability, context and duration you need to spot the
relationship with the fundamental. The abstract possibility of relating
any two frequencies together as some sort of harmonic is of no musical
consequence at all.
> Chicago professor Easly Blackwell (or Blackwood; whatever) was
> interviewed on NPR (American "National Public Radio") a few years ago
> demonstrating purposely traditional-sounding compositions using different
> interval sizes.
Easley Blackwood. I think there's stuff about him on the Just Intonation
Network's website. I don't know his music at all; the BBC does a lousy
job on American experimental music that doesn't relate to the mostly crap
aesthetic programmes of the British musical establishment.
>> Further: there is plenty of Western art music that uses flexible pitch to
>> get just intonation. The Neapolitan music of the 16th century did this all
>> the time, both vocally and instrumentally, and many recorder consorts bend
>> pitch to get the same effect.
> I'd love to hear a recorder consort bending pitch.
The Amsterdam Loeki Stardust Quartet does this quite often. (Can't suggest
any recording as I don't have any, but they've done several).
> They've been talking on irtrad-l about reports from the continent about
> something that sounds very much like harmony, from the jumbled descriptions
> of it, dating back to 12-century Britain, especially Wales & the North of
> Britain, at which time, as one correspondent put it, they were just putting
> together the beginnings of the kind of (very different) harmony they were
> to develop in Europe.
Er, who needs "jumbled descriptions" when we've got scores? "Edi beo thu"
(from southern England) is harmonized in thirds, and the hymn for the
consecration of St Magnus's Cathedral in Kirkwall ends up sounding pretty
much like it thanks to its fortuitous choice of countermelody. Of course
there was harmony of a sort back then. But the difference isn't as
geographically neat as you'd like - the bare fifths and fourths favoured in
France and Italy were closer to Scottish traditional music in its earliest
written forms (like the Skene MS) than were the thirds favoured by the
English and the Scandinavians.
If you want a real geographical mindblower, look at the comparison of
mediaeval French organum and Kartvelian (Georgian) folksong in one of
the early volumes of the old Oxford History of Music.
---> email to "jc" at the site in the header: mail to "jack" will bounce <---
Jack Campin 2 Haddington Place, Edinburgh EH7 4AE, Scotland 0131 556 5272
http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/purrhome.html food intolerance data and recipes,
freeware logic fonts for the Macintosh & Scots folk music from "Off the Edge"
ghost
>In article <28...@purr.demon.co.uk> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>>Another angle: Seumas MacNeill's measurements of Highland bagpipe tunings.
>>It has been common knowledge for centuries that Highland pipes don't play
>>in anything like either a just-intonation or 12-tone-equal-temperament
>>scale. What MacNeill found was that in addition, looking at sets of pipes
>>from a wide range of times and places, they didn't sound much like *each
>>other*, either. No institution until the 19-century British Army needed
>>to care about standardizing them; the result was even more anarchy than you
>>get in the tuning of Indonesian gamelans. Further, this kind of weirdness
>>crosses over to other instruments; while no fiddler will ever play in the
>>same scale as a piper, trying to convey the effect of it is common enough in
>>Cape Breton fiddling to force them to think up a new pitch class name - "C
>>supernatural" - and that pitch is *not* there to make just-intonation triads.
>>(Like Scotland in former times, Cape Breton has no tradition of ensemble
>>playing, except for piano accompaniment. I would be surprised if any two
>>Cape Breton fiddlers used exactly the same frequency for this; if they can
>>play a quartertone sharp of their accompanist they can certainly ignore what
>>the player they heard last week did).
>What I want to know is whether the people discussing these tunings actually
>measured the ratios of the subsequent pitches to the "fundamental" (lowest
>note), or whether they just described them as being sharp or flat with
>regards to Western European tuning, just *or* tempered?
What I also want to know is whether the people who decreed that
pre-British-standardization Highland bagpipes, & Cape Breton fiddling,
were in some kind of tuning that wasn't
"anything like either a just-intonation or 12-tone-equal-temperament scale"
could actually tell the difference between a scale with different interval sizes
than Western just or "equal" tempered (the tempered-scale interval-sizes
are different from untempered <"just">, but are calculated to be
at least *close* to untempered) & a scale that has simply been moved around
so that its not starting on whatever the listener is used to hearing as
a starting pitch, but with the interval sizes left alone.
I ask that because I've met hundreds of people, all from the
European classical camp, who will really yelp if you start singing on a note
they don't recognize. They don't care even if your interval sizes are *exactly*
the ones *they* use; because your notes don't fall at the same frequencies at
which they'd fall if you used their starting pitch, they don't hear any
recognizable notes. They've memorized the actual frequencies in current
orchestral/symphonic use, *not* the intervals.
[A lot of them will tell you proudly they have "perfect pitch", which only
means they have perfectly memorized a lot of meaningless frequency values.]
I also ask because while I probably haven't heard anyone playing what I
know to be pre-British-standardization Highland pipes, I've heard a *lot*
of Cape Breton fiddling (Marcia Young Palmater has a radio show of
Maritime folk music on WMBR-FM in Boston, Thursday evenings 6:30pm - 8:30pm,
& I've also heard a lot of CB fiddlers live) & they don't seem to be using
a scale that's *very* different from Western European untempered.
Ditto for Irish Uillean pipe players, playing pipes that are *not* decreed
"a concert set". I believe "concert set" just refers to the key the
pipes are in, & not a completely different set of interval-sizes from the
non-concert sets. Uillean pipers & old Irish fiddlers & sean-nos singers
& especially old-time Appalachian fiddlers & singers definitely, by my hearing,
use *some* intervals that are not correspondent to the ones on the
Western European-standard untempered map, but only a *few*. The rest match up.
For that matter, Hun-Huur-Tu, the Tuvan throat-singers, generate overtones
that mostly equal the intervals of a Western-European untempered scale.
The ethnomusicologist traveling with them remarked on that in a lecture he gave,
or maybe in response to a question I asked him during the discussion.
He says that throat-singers (people who can produce 2 & 3 notes when
singing by themselves) from parts of Mongolia closer to China than Tuva
produce different overtones, ones used in Chinese folk music, instead.
>unless you *are* charting only Western European scales & using Bach's
>tempering scheme (based on the square-root of 12).
Oops Bach's tempering scheme (or the one accredited to him; I'm told there's
debate about whether he's actually to blame) uses the 12th root of 2 to
generate your pitches. I'm suprised nobody caught this. Or maybe I'm
not suprised.
At any rate, if you generate all your pitches by using
"the 12th root of 2 x the fundamental", then all your neighboring pitches
(including the ones you don't use, since you now have 12 & you only need 8)
will have the same ratio to each other, & multiplied all together will give
you a ratio of "2X the fundamental" to the fundamental of 2:
2X(fundamental)
------------------- = 2
fundamental
(which is what an
octave above the fundamental is: Double the fundamental).
This makes for nifty math, & enables you to move that scale anywhere
but unfortunately choosing your scale-degrees that way makes for very
out-of-tune music if you try to harmonize it using parallel parts &
"open chords" & so forth.
I'll type in Marcovcsik's explanation of the tempering scheme later if anybody
wants it, or maybe just if I want to, but the book's not here right now.
pdraper
ghost <j...@deas.harvard.edu> wrote in article
<61bqsq$3...@necco.harvard.edu>...
>
> What I want to know is whether the people discussing these tunings
actually
> measured the ratios of the subsequent pitches to the "fundamental"
(lowest
> note), or whether they just described them as being sharp or flat with
> regards to Western European tuning, just *or* tempered?
>
I don't want to take issue with any of the other points in this discussion
of tuning, scales and pitches but I would like to point out the the lowest
note on an instrument is not necessarily the right one to measure relative
pitch from. On the Highland pipes I believe that the lowest note is
Timothy Jaques
--
Timothy Jaques tja...@netcom.ca
Windsor, Ontario, Canada
"Common sense is that set of prejudices we attain by the age of eighteen."
ghost <j...@deas.harvard.edu> wrote in article
<61cf9g$5...@necco.harvard.edu>...
> According to a TV special on Cajun music compiled & narrated by Alan
Lomax
> that I saw a while ago, the Acadians didn't come from Brittany
> (they were Huegonots?). So who knows where the term "Cape Breton" comes
> from?
I think they came from Normandy, and some were Basques who jumped ship.
They were not Huguenot, but Roman Catholic. I don't think the French
allowed the settlement of Protestants in their North American possessions.
It is fully called "Cape Breton Island". There is actually a "Cape
Breton" on the eastern side of the island, from which (presumably) the
island got its English name.
> (Me:)
> I've heard the classical piece on CBC many times and not once have I
> >heard the presenter remark on the similarity.
>
(Ghost:)
> They probably never *heard* "D' Ye Ken". They probably never heard
> Bonaparte's Retreat in the original, either, along with about a 10,000
> other unaccredited "folk themes of classical music".
Perhaps so. although it's difficult to think that such a person would not
have heard the "folk" piece, which as you say we used to have to sing in
school to the exclusion of our own local folk songs.
Richard L. Hess
On 7 Oct 1997 21:48:18 GMT, j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>[A lot of them will tell you proudly they have "perfect pitch", which only
>means they have perfectly memorized a lot of meaningless frequency values.]
Dear Ghost,
This has been an interesting discussion for someone who is a music
appreciator, but not a musician nor has studied in depth the math
behind music.
I have one question about the statement quoted above...
It used to be the case that major orchestras around the world did not
all agree on A440. If I recall correctly, some tuned as much as 8Hz
high. If that is the case, how does a musician with "perfect pitch"
work with these different orchestras?
I have very broad tastes in music and I think I enjoy things you do as
well as things that cause you to feel like nails have been scraped on
the blackboard! Thanks to one of your postings, I dug out (and am
greatly enjoying) Gail Rundlett's "Full Circle" but in addition to
what I think of as "folk," [let's NOT get into that discussion again
<smile>] I also enjoy church music -- especially traditional and
modern Anglican boy-choir music. AND, I've even been known to listen
to a Wagner opera.
Cheers!
Richard
http://rlhess.home.mindspring.com/
Peter Wilton
"Richard L. Hess" <rlh...@mindspring.com> writes
>It used to be the case that major orchestras around the world did not
>all agree on A440. If I recall correctly, some tuned as much as 8Hz
>high. If that is the case, how does a musician with "perfect pitch"
>work with these different orchestras?
I'm not sure how one is supposed to reconcile the notion that frequency
values are "meaningless" with the injunction to sing "in tune". If you're
singing tonal, rather than modal music which migrates to many keys (such
music can only exist *because* of equal temperament), equal
temperament can be helpful, and pitch memory can assist. If a piece
starts from a "simple" key, and modulates to one with more sharps or
flats, you might want to adjust away from equal temperament to give
more "clean" triads. So in those circumstances it helps to have pitch
memory and be able to escape from it if desirable. However, pitch
memory can make things more difficult if you're doing a public
performance at sight (which sometimes happens) in a key other than the
one written. Therefore, it's essential to be able to switch it off altogether,
and just think of relative intervals.
It may be that, in the past, relative pitch was more important, so that you
judge whether you're in tune by listening to what's going on around, rather
than by absolute pitch reference. But I also wonder whether the
insistence on perfection in tuning has come with modern recording, and
the possibility of creating a "performance for posterity". Someone once
told me they thought orchestras used "to get away with murder" in the
past, which is known by some from memory of live performances, and
can be heard on some early recordings.
Brian Gotheridge
ghost wrote:
>
> At any rate, if you generate all your pitches by using
> "the 12th root of 2 x the fundamental", then all your neighboring pitches
> (including the ones you don't use, since you now have 12 & you only need 8)
Don't you ever use semitones when you are playing? There are twelve
semitones in the equal tempered scale hence the reason for using 12th
root of 2.
The object of equal temperament is to provide equal intervals between
half notes to enable a fixed pitch instrument eg. organ, to play in any
scale.(Each scale is the same amount "out of tune"). Bach wrote the
"Well tempered Clavier" to show that it worked.He didn't invent equal
temperament he just exploited it it.
Obviously the intervals are not the same as the "natural" scale but it
does obviate the need for a separate instrument for each scale starting
note - (in fact there have been instruments made with multiple keys per
required note - eg one key to sound C# and another fto sound Db).
There is a difference in perceived sound - (which I can hear) - when a
tune is played on an equal tempered instrument compared to a "natural
instrument but which is better depends on the context, original
instrument it was composed for etc. Composers and arrangers("Classical"
and "Folk") have exploited these differences in their music.
It is easy to overlook that what we think of as "sounding correct"
depends on our ethnic background, education, culture, personal taste,
other instruments playing at the same time etc. as well as the science
of Acoustics and temperament
regards
Brian
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
[ pointing out that there has historically been less mutual aggro between
traditional and art-music people in Scotland than in richer countries
like the US ]
> Tell you what: Don't try to fool the world into believing that today's
> Scottish orchestral musicians or Scottish European classical singers
> venture into the folk realm to play ceilis or sing with folk groups, Okay?
I was talking about the historical background. Capitalism crushes national
differences, and today there isn't much difference in the social situation
of orchestral players here and in the US - both are badly paid, and the
prospect of spending a lot of extra time playing something equally
difficult for even less money is hardly going to be very appealing. But
the legacy of the very long period when things were different hasn't gone
away. A few specifics:
- Eddie McGuire (modernist art-music composer) plays the flute in the
Whistlebinkies, a folk group even you might have heard of.
- Robert Crawford (who writes Schoenbergian 12-tone music) spent many years
as the presenter of Radio Scotland's piping programme (and was responsible
for the BBC finally getting round to paying pipers at the musicians' rate)
and used to be employed as a judge for colliery brass band competitions.
- Every single modernist composer working in Scotland that I can think of,
Crawford and John Maxwell Geddes apart, makes use of traditional Scots folk
material frequently. Like, in *most* of their compositions. There is no
parallel to this in England or the US, and within Europe only Scandinavia
gets close. And this has been going on for as long as Scotland has had an
art-music culture.
- I've played in a folk session with Anne Hughes (plays in a busy local
ceilidh band you won't have heard of, and has edited many anthologies of
ceilidh band tunes that you might have) and heard her suddenly launch into
the opening of Bach's Violin Concerto no 2 in E (which well and truly left
me behind). The reason she could do that:
- _Most_ of the folk fiddlers from Scotland you've heard of will have had
classically-based lessons at some point. This is _extremely_ useful given
the characteristics of the Scottish repertoire; this diverged from what
Irish and American fiddlers do some time in the late 18th century, with
heavy use of flat keys and high positions. (As one pal of mine puts it,
"B flat never crossed the Atlantic"). In principle you could roll your own
technique to deal with problems like William Marshall's _Sir Walter Scott_
or Archibald Allan's _The Dean Brig of Edinburgh_, but the techniques
you'll get from a classical teacher will get you closer to what Marshall
and Allan wanted.
> Don't do that & we won't send Jeannie Morrell (Boston-area atrocity),
> who thinks she's a folk-type singer of Scottish songs (& even gives
> lessons in it!) over to sing at you. You haven't died the death of a
> thousand cuts [...] til you've heard this monstrosity on a Burns song.
Burns is a lousy example for you. Over here, most of the Burns songs you'll
hear (apart from godawful renderings for tourists) are *very* much hybrids
between the folk and art-music genres, the Jean Redpath/Serge Hovey
collaboration being fairly typical; - and that was the way Burns intended
most of them. (Redpath has had classical vocal training. Did it do her
any harm?) The _Scottish Musical Museum_ was priced far beyond a worker's
means; I know of no printed folk music that the Scottish poor could afford
until _The Halfpenny Lyre_ came out in Leith in the 1840s. Burns and Johnson
were aiming at an audience that both sang "A Health to Betty" in the pub and
had some Handel and Corelli on the music stand at home. Domestic manuscripts
of the time show that very clearly; Scots reels & Irish jigs & Nathaniel
Gow & Mozart all mixed up. Concert programmes from newspapers around 1800
tell the same story. The kind of people who copied those manuscripts out
were those Burns associated with and were who he was writing for.
Scotland, until recently, was a poor urban society. The US was an affluent
rural one. Why should you expect the social form of their musical cultures
to be at all similar?
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
: What I want to know is whether the people discussing these tunings
: actually measured the ratios of the subsequent pitches to the
: "fundamental" (lowest note), or whether they just described them as
: being sharp or flat with regards to Western European tuning, just *or*
: tempered?
I have no idea which writings of which musicologists you're talking about,
so this is unanswerable. Obviously you'll state the pitch with different
degrees of precision for different purposes; if all you're trying to do is
indicate that the music in question uses different pitches from a symphony
orchestra, just what is wrong with saying "the seventh is between a major
and minor seventh"? Won't do a lot to help you play it, but not all writing
about music has that end in view.
"pdraper" <pdr...@baig.co.uk> writes:
> I don't want to take issue with any of the other points in this discussion
> of tuning, scales and pitches but I would like to point out the the lowest
> note on an instrument is not necessarily the right one to measure relative
> pitch from. On the Highland pipes I believe that the lowest note is
> actually the 'leading note' of the scale ie. the one below the tonic ( to
> use the terminology I learned at school).
You mean the lowest note on the *chanter* (G). The lowest note on the
*pipes* is the bass drone, which octaves the chanter's A.
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) replied:
: You're missing the point that the concept of "leading tones" is taken
: from the kind of harmony Bach developed & has nothing to do with music
: played on the Highland pipes.
So what? The low G *is* used as a "leading" note to the A when it occurs
as the final note in a pipe tune in A; almost all such tunes either have a
single penultimate G gracenote or else {GAG}. The reason for which is just
that the final melodic cadence is generally in the opposite direction, from
a higher note, so it's the natural way to articulate it.. Who do you expect
to be confused by this? I've employed three other misappropriations of
classical terminology in this one paragraph, pipers do the same, and they
don't seem to be any the worse off for it.
And in another message (may as well group this piping stuff together):
: What would you call a piper playing against a drone, if not harmony?
: Forget about it being "triadic harmony" or not.
: The piper's in pretty big trouble if the drone isn't harmonic with the
: rest of the notes with which its going to sound.
There are some notes of the highland bagpipe scale that have no low-order
(i.e. audible) harmonic relationship whatever to the tonic; just look at
Seumas MacNeill's measurements. With 22 cents of variation between different
pipers' idea of the same note of the scale, how could any coherent harmonic
effect be intended? And it doesn't matter a damn. (The E of the pipe scale
*is* close to a perfect fifth from A, because with that note you *can* hear
the difference; the bass drone produces a powerful second harmonic).
There are even instruments that produce anharmonic partials when playing a
single note; bells are an example, typically the strongest upper partial of
a church bell is around an augmented fourth. Doesn't seem to bother the
cultures that use them.
Joe Kesselman, yclept Keshlam
Suggestion: Why don't the folks involved in this debate take it offline to
e-mail? What you think of each other is offtopic for these newsgroups,
and the question of how to define "folk" is a classic undecidable.
Killfile time.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Joseph J. Kesselman http://pages.prodigy.com/keshlam/
Performing November 8th at the Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse:
THE WOMEN OF THE CALIBASH. See my web page for additional info.
"This note is a production of Novalabs Consulting, which is solely
responsible for its content. Opinions not necessarily those of IBM."
ghost
In article <28...@purr.demon.co.uk> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>>> j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>> This time check what *I* wrote. I've written in the past that different
>> forms of traditional music use all kinds of different families of harmonics.
>Or, like many of the styles I mentioned, intervals which have no explanation
>in terms of harmonics of any rational order - for the good physical reason
>that nothing about the way those styles make use of the instrument (or voice)
>requires it.
So far we're in agreement. I said (in one of many articles) that if you're
not going to harmonize & aren't using instruments with a long sustain, you
don't have to worry too much about how individual notes sound against each
other, because you won't be sounding them against each other.
>> This is common knowledge among many traditional musicians of many different
>> kinds of music, but I've gotten a lot of argument recently (off-list) over
>> saying that Indonesian & Turkish music uses different-sized intervals than
>> does Western European folk *&* classical music.
>No argument about that, but they're radically different from each other.
No argument about *that*, either. I was just pointing both out as examples
of traditional music that are widely acknowledged to recognize & use
interval-sizes different than those used in the west. I've gotten argument
off-list about this being widely acknowledged. In my opinion there are also
interval-size differences in music closer to home (to mine anyway).
>Indonesian music (which I alluded to in the post you're responding to) is
>based around two scale *families*, pelog and slendro, but the exact pitch
>sets are different in every gamelan (matched set of gongs and chimes). That
>is, each village has its own double set of instruments, and its own version
>of both the pelog and slendro scale to go with it. This is no accident; the
>instrument builders take a great deal of care to make the scales individual
>for each gamelan they make, and they can take a year or more to reach final
>tuning adjustment. And there is no harmonic basis for *any* of the scales;
>only the octaves are Pythogorean-accurate.
I think there *is* an harmonic basis (& Indonesian music does use
overlapping, interacting tones) but I'm not going to argue that more
right now.
>[ me on Gaelic psalm singing ]
>>> (The one place you do find harmony in Scottish music is in the
>>> psalm and hymn settings of the church; but these are even *more* a product
>>> of the art music tradition than the piano is, and did not start to become
>>> nativized into a folk idiom until about the same time that the piano also
>>> became a folk instrument - and that only in the Western Isles, whereas the
>>> piano got everywhere).
>> Again, go buy & listen to the Greentrax recording of the Hebridean
>> Gaelic psalm-singers. The custom of singing in their particular form
>> of harmonization, which uses a lot more than melody-&-drone; in fact it
>> sounds to me like sean-nos singing, harmonized goes back to the
>> Protestant Reformation. That's 1600-something.
>It's a lot later than that, and the story is much more complex than you're
>suggesting.
I was trying to introduce the topic, not give its whole history.
One comment on the history you give below is that the Kirk's ability
to enforce depended on communication & access; there may have been some
prior to modern communications who escaped the Kirk-dictated revisions.
It sounds like sean-nos singing *to me*. I mentioned that to a sean-nos
singer, Irish naturally, who took issue with me calling it sean-nos,
or even sean-nos-like; "They must have their *own* old style", they said.
I think the issue here is that the Irish sean-nos singers want it
understood that theirs is a distinct body of styles, not that they think
other Gaelic-speaking cultures didn't or don't have similar-sounding styles.
I have one correspondent who's grandparents in Nova Scotia belonged to a
community that sang in the style of the Gaelic psalm-singers of the Hebrides.
This community is no longer singing in that style.
I have another correspondent who has researched Sacred Harp-style singing
in Nova Scotia & found that the last singing-school teacher died in the
1930s, & their last students died very recently. There is no longer a
Sacred Harp-style singing community in Nova Scotia with a traditional
heritage (the correspondent belongs to a revivalist group) but the
traditional singers did persist up through the 1st 3rd of this century.
Before, during & in the middle of the process of musical-elimination in
Scotland that you outline above, members of those cultures came over here
(North America), retaining the form of music they were singing at the time
they came over, & well out of the influence of the religous authorities
in Scotland. There are sects here in North America today of Baptists &
Methodists singing in styles that resemble pre-intervention styles in Scotland.
Its hard to say whether they brought the folk tunes they sing the
religious texts to over with them or picked them up over here, but they *are*
singing religious texts to folk tunes, not just those eventual 6 tunes
described above. There have been a few commercially available recordings
of this (some now out of print).
You can listen to individual songs & try to decide whether they sound
British, Scottish, Irish or a combination of all 3, but one thing certain
is that they are folk tunes.
Some of these communities sing in an harmonic style that strikingly resembles
that found in the north of England, Cornwall & Sussex. others are
mostly-unison, but have some of the same harmony, & often sound like they're
going to burst into full-blown north-of-England/Cornwall/Sussex-style
harmony at any time.
>>> It has been common knowledge for centuries that Highland pipes don't play
>>> in anything like either a just-intonation or 12-tone-equal-temperament
>>> scale.
>> The math tells you there are an infinite amount of possible harmonics.
>> You're certainly not limited to a Western European diatonic (or chromatic)
>> scale.
>And the math here is quite useless. What just intonation gives you is a
>distinctive sound *when playing harmonically*. Bagpipes are not played
>harmonically (certain rather horrible 20th-century military experiments
I say again that notes played against a continuous drone had better be
harmonic with the drone.
>> They've been talking on irtrad-l about reports from the continent about
>> something that sounds very much like harmony, from the jumbled descriptions
>> of it, dating back to 12-century Britain, especially Wales & the North of
>> Britain, at which time, as one correspondent put it, they were just putting
>> together the beginnings of the kind of (very different) harmony they were
>> to develop in Europe.
>Er, who needs "jumbled descriptions" when we've got scores? "Edi beo thu"
>(from southern England) is harmonized in thirds, and the hymn for the
>consecration of St Magnus's Cathedral in Kirkwall ends up sounding pretty
>much like it thanks to its fortuitous choice of countermelody. Of course
>there was harmony of a sort back then. But the difference isn't as
>geographically neat as you'd like - the bare fifths and fourths favoured in
>France and Italy were closer to Scottish traditional music in its earliest
>written forms (like the Skene MS) than were the thirds favoured by the
>English and the Scandinavians.
I don't think it geographically neat, easily geographically seperable, or
whatever. But I do think befuddled descriptions from the continent *are*
useful in telling us that the describers were hearing harmony of a form alien
to them; apparently *any* form of harmony was alien to some of these early
(12 century) European describers of music in Britain.
>If you want a real geographical mindblower, look at the comparison of
>mediaeval French organum and Kartvelian (Georgian) folksong in one of
>the early volumes of the old Oxford History of Music.
And I've got a snatch of a recording of a feature on NPR, "Masters of Folk",
on a Serbian or Croatian tamburitza player which played a bit of the
musician's home church's choral music; sounded very much like Sacred Harp
being sung in Serbian or Croatian, & probably also resembled Soviet Georgian
religious choral music.
I've heard religous choral music employing open chords & full-throated
singing styles from places as far apart as Iceland & Soviet Georgia.
Some times the structure &/or singing style is very similar to that found
in Sacred Harp; sometimes, as with Les Polyphones du Corse (whose name I've
just clobbered), neither structure or singing style are similar,
despite those open chords.
ghost _
>I'm not sure how one is supposed to reconcile the notion that frequency
>values are "meaningless" with the injunction to sing "in tune". If you're
>singing tonal, rather than modal music which migrates to many keys (such
>music can only exist *because* of equal temperament), equal
How much traditional music, from anywhere in the world, can you cite
that changes key midpiece???? (Discounting the 42 Irish groups who nowadays
think a key-changing medley is required; to quote Cathal McConnell of
Boys of the Lough, speaking only semihumorously:
"We expect you *clap* when we change key!"").
This is the rec.music.folk newsgroup. The people I speak of who can't sing
in tune are all supposed to be singing Southern American folk music.
This music hardly ever changes key mid-piece, traditionally.
Its not only modal traditional music in this tradition that doesn't change key,
& describing music in general as "tonal vs modal" is also meaningless. If it
doesn't have some kind of tones, you can't hear it, & it isn't music.
If you're saying that the bulk of key-changing music in the European classical
genre is not melodic, though, I certainly agree with you.
>temperament can be helpful, and pitch memory can assist. If a piece
>starts from a "simple" key, and modulates to one with more sharps or
>flats, you might want to adjust away from equal temperament to give
>more "clean" triads. So in those circumstances it helps to have pitch
>memory and be able to escape from it if desirable. However, pitch
>memory can make things more difficult if you're doing a public
>performance at sight (which sometimes happens) in a key other than the
>one written. Therefore, it's essential to be able to switch it off altogether,
>and just think of relative intervals.
I've got a jerk over on rec.music.early I'd like you to explain this to.
Patience is required. But you both speak the same "early-music-speak"
most of the time, so you should get along. Oh yeah, this character claims
to be able to teach people to sing untempered (& charges them for it), but they
can't sing in *any* kind of temperament consistantly to save their life,
& their tone is nauseating (you might like it, or at least try to muster up
"competence to appreciate it", as you say that's your kind of thing).
They also think memorizing a fixed-pitch scale in various fixed keys is
essential. And they *also* have this thing about behaving as though a piece is
going to change key when it clearly, from traditonal performance as well as
from the sheet music they must look at to sing anything, does not.
Oh yeah, & they *also* don't realize that if you leave out enough of the
difference-establishing notes, you can't tell various modes from each
other. I know *hordes* of people who don't realize that.
I can often tell modes apart by melodic & rythmic structure of the
piece even if difference-establishing notes are not there, but their
absence does make it harder.
ghost
In article <jnEffFAo...@freereed.demon.co.uk> Anahata <Ana...@freereed.demon.co.uk> writes:
>Presumably they always try to make their harmony a simple ratio between
>whatever notes they are currently singing, rather than a simple ratio
>with some arbitrary keynote. I don't know what the fromal definition of
>just intonation is, but as a piece in harmony progresses, it journeys
>temporarily through lots of different keys, so if justy intonation is
Only European classical harmony does that. British harmony doesn't,
Scottish Hebridean harmony doesn't, Balkan harmony doesn't, South African
harmony doesn't, Appalachian harmony doesn't, Polynesian harmony doesn't,
Icelandic harmony doesn't, Corsican harmony doesn't, Soviet Georgian harmony
doesn't (I don't remember it doing it anyway; haven't heard any in a while),
French harmony doesn't, Icelandic harmony doesn't.
I've left a bunch of other traditional harmonies out, but you get the picture.
>about relating to some root note, we're simply saying that root note
>changes with the harmony.
>Incidentally there is another solution: electronic conventional
>keyboards with settings for different home keys which make the small
>pitch changes needed. But for the reasons described above, you'd
>probably have to keep changing the 'home key' setting to keep the
>harmony perfect. Maybe it could be done automatically by the instrument
>analysing the notes being played and tweaking them dynamically.
I like this idea, but I don't like the actual tonal quality of
synthesizer sounds as well as the sounds of the instruments they're
trying to emulate.
ghost
>In article <28...@purr.demon.co.uk> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>>(Redpath has had classical vocal training. Did it do her
>>any harm?)
->Redpath said within the last 2 years on an interview on Robert J. Lurtsema's
->*very* European classical program (with a few folk pieces thrown in every
->so often if he likes them) on WGBH radio in Boston that she has never had
->any classical voice training. She said that people often assume she has
->had, probably because of what she sounds like, & probably because of the work
->with Hovey. She says she learned to sing by copying Scottish folk singers
->she admired (I don't think she named which ones; I don't remember if she
->did, at any rate).
Oops it may have been an interview on WUMB. She's been interviewed several
times on WGBH by Lurtsema, host of the Burns Nights they've been presenting
for the past several years, but they didn't do one last year & I think I
heard this interview within the past 2. I also seem to remember hearing
the questions being asked by a woman, which would have been one of the
interviewers on WUMB; Lurtsema is not a woman.
ghost
In article <dummy-08109...@ao067.du.pipex.com> du...@dial.pipex.com (Phil Taylor) writes:
>Ghost wrote:
...
>>>unless you *are* charting only Western European scales & using Bach's
>>>tempering scheme (based on the square-root of 12).
>>Oops Bach's tempering scheme (or the one accredited to him; I'm told there's
>>debate about whether he's actually to blame) uses the 12th root of 2 to
>>generate your pitches. I'm suprised nobody caught this. Or maybe I'm
>>not suprised.
><explanation of equal temperament>
>>This makes for nifty math, & enables you to move that scale anywhere
>>but unfortunately choosing your scale-degrees that way makes for very
>>out-of-tune music if you try to harmonize it using parallel parts &
>>"open chords" & so forth.
>Not _very_ out of tune. 95% of listeners probably can't hear the
>difference between equal temperament and just intonation. Even
They can if you harmonize it with parallel lines of music that are
supposed to be at harmonic intervals, but that aren't
harmonic anymore because of your tempering scheme.
That's why Bach left music-construction instructions
outlawing parallel intervals.
I agree that if the notes go by sequentially, unharmonized & very rapidly
people (sometimes even me, I'm people) are going to find it hard to tell
what tempering scheme you are or aren't in. As you go up the tempered
octaves, though, you hit some things that sound offensively squeaky to me,
even when played on solo violin by one of the European classical fiddle
stars. I have to assume that by their tempering scheme those are the notes
they meant to play.
>if you can, just intonation is not necessarily the right answer.
>I've built dulcimers in just intonation, and they sound fine
>in some modes, wrong in others. It's not sufficient to create
>a scale where each note makes the correct interval with the key
>note: you also have to consider the intervals between the individual
>notes too. Here is the set of intervals used in just intonation:
That's exactly what I was saying, & giving examples of. Each tuning
in just temperament works just (!) for the the "key" its in.
There are some notes that will work if you change key, & some that won't.
Ditto for changing mode, even in the same key; some of your interval-ratios
are different when you go out of the Ionian/Aeolian ("major/minor")system.
>1. Learn to love the equally tempered scale.
>2. Stick to instruments (fiddle, voice) where all the notes can be
> tuned on the fly.
>3. Invent an instrument which has lots of notes per octave, so you
> can always find the one you want (it's been done many times, but
> none of them have caught on because they're too difficult to play).
That's exactly the solution (or "improbable solution") Marcovcsik was
giving in the excerpt I typed in (he didn't actually say
"invent an instrument with lots of notes",
but he demonstrated that you would *need* lots of notes).
>2 is the only perfect solution, but don't think that your favourite
>harmony group is singing in just intonation when all their chords
>come out right - it's more complicated than that.
My favorite harmony groups *are* singing in just intonation, with a few
intervals that aren't on the Western European official map, but that sound
good, thrown in.
My favorite harmony groups are not singing Bach, needless to say.
ghost
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>: What I want to know is whether the people discussing these tunings
>: actually measured the ratios of the subsequent pitches to the
>: "fundamental" (lowest note), or whether they just described them as
>: being sharp or flat with regards to Western European tuning, just *or*
>: tempered?
>I have no idea which writings of which musicologists you're talking about,
The ones *you* were talking about in your article, the ones you said found
wide variations in the tuning on pre-British-regulation Scottish Highland
bagpipes, & among Cape Beton fiddlers. You mentioned them, & repeated
their less-than-informative observations. so you must know whom you're
talking about.
>so this is unanswerable. Obviously you'll state the pitch with different
>degrees of precision for different purposes; if all you're trying to do is
>indicate that the music in question uses different pitches from a symphony
>orchestra, just what is wrong with saying "the seventh is between a major
>and minor seventh"? Won't do a lot to help you play it, but not all writing
>about music has that end in view.
Agreed, but you entered this discussion saying that pre-regulation Scottish
Highland bagpipes & Cape Breton fiddlers were at variance with
just temperament as well as with "equal"-temperament, so I asked if your
sources ever got more specific about it than what you reported them as saying.
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) replied:
>: You're missing the point that the concept of "leading tones" is taken
>: from the kind of harmony Bach developed & has nothing to do with music
>: played on the Highland pipes.
>So what? The low G *is* used as a "leading" note to the A when it occurs
>as the final note in a pipe tune in A; almost all such tunes either have a
>single penultimate G gracenote or else {GAG}. The reason for which is just
>that the final melodic cadence is generally in the opposite direction, from
>a higher note, so it's the natural way to articulate it.. Who do you expect
>to be confused by this? I've employed three other misappropriations of
>classical terminology in this one paragraph, pipers do the same, and they
>don't seem to be any the worse off for it.
I've heard a lot of old Irish music which structurally is unlike most of what
European classical music, or British ballad structure, or French song
structure, would lead you to expect. Anne Heymann thinks a lot of the
Irish wire-strung harp music was readapted to the structure & scales
of the Scottish Highland pipes, rather than disappearing completely, but
its hard to reconstruct what it originally sounded like from the
adaptation. *Some* of the influences on this adaptation process had
to come from European classical music theory; the whole practise of
piobrachaid (or however its spelled) sounds too much like European classical
exercises to be completely coincidental; one of them almost had to be
the inspiration for the other.
I'd be wary of using the terminology of European classical music even for
describing structural stuff that seems similar to that for which the
terminolgy was invented. It leads to expect things of the music that
aren't going to happen, & it leads some people who are grounded entirely
in European classical theory to *force* them to happen.
>And in another message (may as well group this piping stuff together):
>: What would you call a piper playing against a drone, if not harmony?
>: Forget about it being "triadic harmony" or not.
>: The piper's in pretty big trouble if the drone isn't harmonic with the
>: rest of the notes with which its going to sound.
>There are some notes of the highland bagpipe scale that have no low-order
>(i.e. audible) harmonic relationship whatever to the tonic; just look at
>Seumas MacNeill's measurements. With 22 cents of variation between different
>pipers' idea of the same note of the scale, how could any coherent harmonic
>effect be intended?
If they're far enough apart to be hitting 2 different harmonics, its
probably intentional. Its just that the piper who made pipe #1 liked
one effect, & the piper who made pipe #2 (I'm told they used to make their
own pipes) like another. What relation do these notes that don't relate to
the tonic have to the drones?
>And it doesn't matter a damn. (The E of the pipe scale
>*is* close to a perfect fifth from A, because with that note you *can* hear
>the difference; the bass drone produces a powerful second harmonic).
>There are even instruments that produce anharmonic partials when playing a
>single note; bells are an example, typically the strongest upper partial of
>a church bell is around an augmented fourth. Doesn't seem to bother the
>cultures that use them.
Depends if that augmented 4th (one of the intervals I *haven't* had much
self-ear-training on, but I've certainly heard a lot of church bells).
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost _ writes:
> How much traditional music, from anywhere in the world, can you cite
> that changes key midpiece????
Change of mode and accordingly tonal centre while keeping the same notes
is pretty common in Scottish music. There is a spectacular example of the
same procedure from Ireland, "The Pinch of Snuff" - anybody know who wrote
that, if it has a known composer?
> (Discounting the 42 Irish groups who nowadays think a key-changing
> medley is required; to quote Cathal McConnell of Boys of the Lough,
> speaking only semihumorously: "We expect you *clap* when we change key!"").
Cathal being the guy who turns up to pub sessions around here carrying two
whistles held together with sellotape so he can do key changes as fast as a
panpipe player can bang out scales. And who has been known to show off by
playing in E flat on a D whistle. I don't think he was kidding.
It's very unusual nowadays to hear a Scottish dance set that doesn't change
key signature, even if it has as few as 3 tunes.
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>> Over here, most of the Burns songs you'll hear (apart from godawful
>> renderings for tourists) are *very* much hybrids between the folk and
>> art-music genres, the Jean Redpath/Serge Hovey collaboration being
>> fairly typical; - and that was the way Burns intended most of them.
> I've been told (by many Scottish traditional musicians in local radio
> interviews, & doing Burns presentations) that Burns intended for his
> songs to be picked up by the people he grew up among (though mainly
> they were picked up by British & Scottish parlor society instead).
> He regarded the parlor-society interpretations as a necessary evil
> connected to getting them published & circulated. He was trying to keep
> many tunes from dying out by giving them words.
That's certainly what Burns *said* he was doing. His actual achievement
is *not* something folk musicians can regard as purely constructive; trying
to replace the artistic achievement of a whole people with your own personal
work is not, in my book, a great way of preserving it. In the cases where
Burns provided sanitized words for old songs, he did *not* record the
original, even in manuscript; he wanted the folk version to *disappear*.
By contrast, his older contemporary David Herd couldn't publish everything
he collected, but he *did* make sure nothing got lost; Burns knew of Herd's
example and chose to ignore it.
And many of the tunes Burns put words to were in no danger at all of being
lost. Popular dance tunes like William Marshall's _Miss Admiral Gordon's
Strathspey_ certainly didn't need his help, and, while you mightn't have
heard of the English composer William Shield's opera _Rosina_ today, at the
time he and Johnson used the big tune from its overture for what became the
most-performed of all Burns songs, it was a popular hit all across Britain.
For these, the truth is the opposite of the legend; far from rescuing them
from obscurity, Burns was coat-tailing on their popularity.
I have spent a lot of time in recent months trying to find old, traditional,
un-drawing-room-ified versions of Scottish songs (to be used in a context
that will surprise most people; buy my book when it comes out). For this
purpose, Herd's manuscripts as edited by Hecht are a real help, whereas
Burns is more often an obstructive egomaniacal pain in the arse than a
useful source. He *wrote* incomparably better than Allan Ramsay, but as a
*collector* he was not much of an improvement. There is, I think, exactly
one song for which Burns is the primary source, Jean Glover of Kilmarnock's
"O'er the Muir Amang the Heather", and even that may have an antecedent.
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>> j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>>: What I want to know is whether the people discussing these tunings
>>: actually measured the ratios of the subsequent pitches to the
>>: "fundamental" (lowest note), or whether they just described them as
>>: being sharp or flat with regards to Western European tuning, just *or*
>>: tempered?
>> I have no idea which writings of which musicologists you're talking about,
> The ones *you* were talking about in your article, the ones you said found
>wide variations in the tuning on pre-British-regulation Scottish Highland
>bagpipes, & among Cape Beton fiddlers. You mentioned them, & repeated
>their less-than-informative observations. so you must know whom you're
>talking about.
I gave the name: Seumas MacNeill. It had never occurred to me to think of
the most influential figure in the piping world in the last 100 years or so
as a "musicologist", but if you want to see him that way, fine. I haven't
seen his original report and I'm not sure if it was published; some of the
numbers are quoted in Francis Collinson's "Bagpipe, Fiddle and Harp", others
(I think) in Collinson's larger book on bagpipes which I don't have handy,
and which also contains frequency measurements for other kinds of European
bagpipe. (If I recall it right, Highland pipes have the least standardized
scale of any in Europe).
> I've heard a lot of old Irish music which structurally is unlike most of
> what European classical music, or British ballad structure, or French song
> structure, would lead you to expect. Anne Heymann thinks a lot of the
> Irish wire-strung harp music was readapted to the structure & scales
> of the Scottish Highland pipes, rather than disappearing completely
Collinson was probably the first to suggest something like that, in the book
I cited; except that his suggestions are about old *Scottish* harp music
being adapted to the pipes. From what we know of the mobility of harpers,
much of the repertoire would have been shared anyway.
> *Some* of the influences on this adaptation process had to come from
> European classical music theory; the whole practise of piobrachaid (or
> however its spelled) sounds too much like European classical exercises
> to be completely coincidental; one of them almost had to be the inspiration
> for the other.
In the case of piobaireachd, I very much doubt it. There are plenty of
examples from the repertoires of *other* instruments which resemble the
variation forms of European art music in the Baroque; about half of the
McFarlan MS of 1740-3 (which most people will tell you was for the fiddle;
I think it was equally meant for the transverse flute) is variation sets.
None of them is anything like piobaireachd; what they *are* like is the
variation forms used on the various Lowland forms of bagpipe, which have
continued to the present day in Northumbria. The idea that piobaireachd
variation is like that of classical music is an old cliche which doesn't
make *any* discernible sense when you look at what's actually happening in
the music - try thumb variation, for one. It suited the Victorians to
think that way so they could neatly categorize the McCrimmons as the Bach
family transplanted to the Highlands.
> I'd be wary of using the terminology of European classical music even for
> describing structural stuff that seems similar to that for which the
> terminolgy was invented. It leads to expect things of the music that
> aren't going to happen, & it leads some people who are grounded entirely
> in European classical theory to *force* them to happen.
You're a good many generations too damn late. Pipers use this terminology
*themselves* and they aren't going to change it to suit you; *they* know
what they mean when they say a tune is "in A".
>> There are some notes of the highland bagpipe scale that have no low-order
>> (i.e. audible) harmonic relationship whatever to the tonic; just look at
>> Seumas MacNeill's measurements. With 22 cents of variation between
>> different pipers' idea of the same note of the scale, how could any
>> coherent harmonic effect be intended?
> If they're far enough apart to be hitting 2 different harmonics, its
> probably intentional.
It's a mathematical triviality that they must hit *some* harmonic. But
unless the order is low enough it won't be doing so in an audible way,
and it sure isn't for a lot of the notes of the pipe scale.
> Its just that the piper who made pipe #1 liked one effect, & the piper
> who made pipe #2 (I'm told they used to make their own pipes) like another.
If Highland pipers ever made their own it must have been a *very* long time
in the past. What they *do* do on their own is tune them to match other
players (i.e. *one* other player, the pipe major), with bits of sellotape
part-covering the chanter holes - the present-day sound of the military
pipe band is only possible thanks to the 3M Company. This is no more part
of ancient folk tradition than the standard dimensions of NATO ammunition.
> What relation do these notes that don't relate to the tonic have to the
> drones?
Drones are tuned to the chanter A. The bass drone produces a strong second
harmonic and the tenor a strong first harmonic. That's all. So they don't
affect this argument by introducing any new pitches to relate to.
ghost
In article <343BBC...@DERBY.AC.UK> Brian Gotheridge <B.M.GOT...@DERBY.AC.UK> writes:
>ghost wrote:
->> At any rate, if you generate all your pitches by using
->> "the 12th root of 2 x the fundamental", then all your neighboring pitches
->> (including the ones you don't use, since you now have 12 & you only need 8)
>Don't you ever use semitones when you are playing?
I don't play, I sing (opinions may vary on how well).
I sure do use what you would probably call semitones when I sing, but not
the 12 fixed by a tempered scale, I bet.
ghost
>Scotland, until recently, was a poor urban society. The US was an affluent
>rural one. Why should you expect the social form of their musical cultures
>to be at all similar?
If you think the affluence in the US was or is specifically located in
the rural areas, you've got another think coming
(& probably not from me alone).
ghost
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>>> Over here, most of the Burns songs you'll hear (apart from godawful
>>> renderings for tourists) are *very* much hybrids between the folk and
>>> art-music genres, the Jean Redpath/Serge Hovey collaboration being
>>> fairly typical; - and that was the way Burns intended most of them.
>> I've been told (by many Scottish traditional musicians in local radio
>> interviews, & doing Burns presentations) that Burns intended for his
>> songs to be picked up by the people he grew up among (though mainly
>> they were picked up by British & Scottish parlor society instead).
>> He regarded the parlor-society interpretations as a necessary evil
>> connected to getting them published & circulated. He was trying to keep
>> many tunes from dying out by giving them words.
>That's certainly what Burns *said* he was doing. His actual achievement
>is *not* something folk musicians can regard as purely constructive; trying
>to replace the artistic achievement of a whole people with your own personal
>work is not, in my book, a great way of preserving it. In the cases where
>Burns provided sanitized words for old songs, he did *not* record the
>original, even in manuscript; he wanted the folk version to *disappear*.
>By contrast, his older contemporary David Herd couldn't publish everything
>he collected, but he *did* make sure nothing got lost; Burns knew of Herd's
>example and chose to ignore it.
>And many of the tunes Burns put words to were in no danger at all of being
>lost. Popular dance tunes like William Marshall's _Miss Admiral Gordon's
>Strathspey_ certainly didn't need his help, and, while you mightn't have
>heard of the English composer William Shield's opera _Rosina_ today, at the
>time he and Johnson used the big tune from its overture for what became the
>most-performed of all Burns songs, it was a popular hit all across Britain.
>For these, the truth is the opposite of the legend; far from rescuing them
>from obscurity, Burns was coat-tailing on their popularity.
And I don't know what song you mean; please specify.
Could be "Aulde Lange Syne" (feel free to peel off or add on all
ye auld<eee> "eeeeeee"s that are needed here);
could be "Ae Fond Kiss"; could be "My Love Is Like a Red Red Rose";
could be some song popular in its day that I don't even know about or
that just doesn't register with me when I hear it. I doubt very much that
the Shield operatic version of anything was closer to the traditional form than
Burns' reworded versions of things set to traditional tunes.
The story on "Aulde Lange Syne" I've always been given is that Burns wanted
it published with the modal tune he chose & his publisher over-rode him,
providing what sounds to me like a major-key version of the same tune
(Sileas used to segue the 2 into each other in concert); I doubt that
a modal version of anything was featured in Sheild's opera, if ALS is the
tune you mean.
I generally like the original modal versions of the majorized &
rearranged-modal tunes, once I get to hear them, at least as well as the
more famous versions, & often better; I generally like the traditional words
to songs Burns re-wrote at least as well as Burns' words, & sometimes better.
The point here is that the traditional words to at least some of these songs
have not been lost. Do you think Burns was actively trying to replace them,
or do you think he thought the tune could stand another set of words,
with him holding copyright on the new set?
The songs Jean Redpath usually introduces as "songs Burns tried to *save*
by putting words to" are set to pipe tunes, are *not* easily-singable songs,
& are most of them not songs that have entered any tradition as songs,
despite Burns' intentions.
Redpath happily mentions that a lot of these tunes aren't easily singable;
she says you need an extra lung (presumably giving you enough air to sing
double- & triple-speed), which she of course then demonstrates that she has
(& which most of the rest of us don't). She does usually comment that most
of these tunes seem to have been preserved in the piping tradition, despite
Burns' worries that pipers were a dying breed. I wouldn't disparage the
view Burns had from his era of the piping of traditional Scottish material
being a dying tradition as an egomaniacal excuse for appropriating the
pipe tunes; he probably looked around him & didn't see very many people
aspiring to learn to be traditional pipers. The tradition of
Irish wire-strung harping *had* died out already, as an example of a
tradition being lost within 2 generations, by Burns' time.
ghost
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost _ writes:
>> How much traditional music, from anywhere in the world, can you cite
>> that changes key midpiece????
>Change of mode and accordingly tonal centre while keeping the same notes
>is pretty common in Scottish music.
I know it is *now*, but do you think it was common way-back-when (200 years
ago, not 2000). The Scottish/British/Irish-derived old-time American music I'm
familiar with, both acapella & instrumental, does not traditionally change
key/tonal center. As to whether it changes mode: hard to tell *what*
some of that stuff is doing. I think the old rules for
"how mode-X behaves & what notes does it traditionally get to have in it"
are a lot more faithfully observed in this old-time American stuff, but the
problem is that almost everybody except those devoted to
old-time American stuff iron-outs & adapts & modernizes the quirks in the tunes
they work into their repertoire, & even devotees can't always figure out
from listening to a recording exactly how the player of a fiddle-tune
had tuned or *what* they were doing to get that sound. To copy what a
singer is doing, you just sing along. You can do this with recordings but
its more fun with live people.
One observation Heymann makes on the notes for one
1/2-hour long pipe piobrach piece she's transposed back for harp is that
she *can* move modes around (I'll have to check if she's changing tonal
center too; no reason why change of mode should be accompanied by change
of tonal center unless you're limited by your notes available on the
instrument) much more easily on an instrument, large wire-strung harp,
that has both a greater range & more notes/range (I think)
than the Highland pipes. I'll have to look up what she says & transcribe it.
>There is a spectacular example of the
>same procedure from Ireland, "The Pinch of Snuff" - anybody know who wrote
>that, if it has a known composer?
I'm told that "Music for a Found (or Lost; whatever) Harmonium" is making the
rounds as a session piece, with a lot of grumbling attending the
requisite key changes. That one *is* a composed tune, I'm told.
>> (Discounting the 42 Irish groups who nowadays think a key-changing
>> medley is required; to quote Cathal McConnell of Boys of the Lough,
>> speaking only semihumorously: "We expect you to *clap* when we change key!"").
>Cathal being the guy who turns up to pub sessions around here carrying two
>whistles held together with sellotape so he can do key changes as fast as a
>panpipe player can bang out scales. And who has been known to show off by
>playing in E flat on a D whistle. I don't think he was kidding.
So they call that 3M product "sellotape" in Scotland.
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>> many of the tunes Burns put words to were in no danger at all of being
>> lost. Popular dance tunes like William Marshall's _Miss Admiral Gordon's
>> Strathspey_ certainly didn't need his help, and, while you mightn't have
>> heard of the English composer William Shield's opera _Rosina_ today, at
>> the time he and Johnson used the big tune from its overture for what
>> became the most-performed of all Burns songs, it was a popular hit all
>> across Britain. For these, the truth is the opposite of the legend; far
>> from rescuing them from obscurity, Burns was coat-tailing on their
>> popularity.
> And I don't know what song you mean; please specify.
Auld Lang Syne. Shield had taken the tune from a Scottish dance version,
_The Miller's Wedding_, published by Angus Cumming; Cumming in turn had
adapted it from a Lowland Scots song, _I fee'd a lad at Michaelmas_. The
dance tune at least was still in use, but the reason Johnson picked it was
because Shield had got everybody singing and playing it. It turns up
(titled _Rosina_, not _Auld Lang Syne_ or one of the original names) in
pre-1800 Scottish manuscript copies for fiddle, flute, keyboard and fife.
Probably because darn near any instrument can play it.
> I doubt very much that the Shield operatic version of anything was closer
> to the traditional form than Burns' reworded versions of things set to
> traditional tunes.
You don't know a thing about Shield and your doubts are plucked out of thin
air. He didn't modify the tune at all, apart from rescoring; the version
he started with was for fiddle and, for dramatic reasons, he scored it for
double reeds to make it sound like bagpipes. Shield and Burns were doing
variants of the same enterprise; they were near-equally knowledgeable about
folk music (Shield in less depth over a wider geographical range) and both
were turning it into a product for a middle class audience with only so-so
financial success.
> The story on "Aulde Lange Syne" I've always been given is that Burns wanted
> it published with the modal tune he chose & his publisher over-rode him,
> providing what sounds to me like a major-key version of the same tune
> (Sileas used to segue the 2 into each other in concert); I doubt that
> a modal version of anything was featured in Sheild's opera, if ALS is the
> tune you mean.
Burns's original choice was "Lewie Gordon", but he instantly agreed with
Johnson when he found out what he'd done. I haven't seen the full score
of _Rosina_ (the nearest copy to me is in the Mitchell Library in Glasgow),
but I can't see anybody balking at a non-diatonic mode who was capable of
writing a folk-based piece in 5/4 time and who had sufficient dedication to
folk music to go thousands of miles round Europe collecting it when his
financial resources were a small fraction of peanuts. The only music of
Shield's I know is probably quite unrepresentative, given its weird purpose;
it still sounds a bit like traditional music from his native Geordieland.
> the traditional words to at least some of these songs have not been lost.
> Do you think Burns was actively trying to replace them, or do you think
> he thought the tune could stand another set of words, with him holding
> copyright on the new set?
I don't think copyright came into it. Egomania did. He thought he could
do *better* than the tradition and that Scotland's music would be improved
by ditching the crude, inferior raw material subsequently transformed by
his genius. He's perfectly explicit about that. He was far from the first
to take that stance, but when he was writing there were still traditional
versions of songs like "Clout the Cauldron" or "Lumps of Pudding" around;
all we've got now is a kitsch Allan-Ramsay-fied version of the former and a
fragment of the latter copied out by Herd. Burns's versions are dead funny
(if rather artificial) in the first case and one of his greatest songs in
the second, but they are *not* a substitute for the originals.
> The songs Jean Redpath usually introduces as "songs Burns tried to *save*
> by putting words to" are set to pipe tunes, are *not* easily-singable songs,
> & are most of them not songs that have entered any tradition as songs,
> despite Burns' intentions.
Rather few Burns tunes had anything to do with the pipes in his lifetime.
His instrument was the fiddle; where he borrowed an instrumental tune it
was usually for that, and when he notated a song, he did it from the fiddle.
(From the comments he makes on being blown away by the oboist Fraser's
playing, it seems he wasn't a very expressive fiddler himself and hadn't
had much contact with fiddlers who could play slow airs well).
> Redpath happily mentions that a lot of these tunes aren't easily singable;
> she says you need an extra lung (presumably giving you enough air to sing
> double- & triple-speed), which she of course then demonstrates that she has
> (& which most of the rest of us don't).
They also sometimes have a much wider range than the pipes, which makes them
even more of a bastard to sing.
> She does usually comment that most of these tunes seem to have been
> preserved in the piping tradition, despite Burns' worries that pipers
> were a dying breed. I wouldn't disparage the view Burns had from his
> era of the piping of traditional Scottish material being a dying tradition
> as an egomaniacal excuse for appropriating the pipe tunes;
Damn few Burns tunes work on the pipes at all. You need more than nine
notes, or a *different* nine notes. You will occasionally find some
schlocky military arrangement of one in a regimental tunebook, but they
invariably sound vastly better on what they were originally intended for,
be it voice, fiddle or flute. Opening my copy of the OUP _Poems & Songs_
at random, and starting at #229 sometime in 1789:
- The Banks of Nith: okay, that's doable and may even have been used as a
pipe tune at some point.
- The 7th of November: fiddle tune, range A-d. forget it.
- The blue-eyed Lassie: range D-b'. You have got to be kidding.
- A Mother's Lament (Finlayston House): fiddle tune, B-f#. Dear god, can
*anybody* sing that?
- The Lazy Mist. An Irish song from the Pale and sounds like one.
- Whistle o'er the lave o't: a traditional love song part of which was
collected by Herd. Range too wide for the pipes, and this one place
where Burns's text, original as it is, does *not* improve on tradition,
or what we have left of it, and is partly responsible for it vanishing;
the older song was regarded as too obscene to publish, whereas Burns's
exercise in mean-spirited misogyny was quite acceptable. Print won.
- Tam Glen. Modulating tonality. Needs an instrument that can do semitonal
inflections. Pipes can't.
And so on. I could trace all of these but you can probably find copies of
Stenhouse, Gore & the like as easily as me.
> he probably looked around him & didn't see very many people aspiring to
> learn to be traditional pipers.
He was at the wrong end of the country for that. I doubt you have many
people aspiring to be part of a Caribbean steel band in Boston, either;
Trinidad is about as accessible from where you are as the Highlands was
to Burns. There were immigrant pipers in Edinburgh in Burns's time, but
no structure for teaching new players, nor had there ever been. But there
was no sign of the fiddle and flute going out of fashion; and since those
were what most of the instrumental traditional music he knew had been played
on for the preceding 100 years, what was there to worry about?
Tony P
Phil Taylor <du...@dial.pipex.com> wrote
> [snip]
> The only solutions I can think of are:
>
> 1. Learn to love the equally tempered scale.
> 2. Stick to instruments (fiddle, voice) where all the notes can be
> tuned on the fly.
> 3. Invent an instrument which has lots of notes per octave, so you
> can always find the one you want (it's been done many times, but
> none of them have caught on because they're too difficult to play).
>
> harmony group is singing in just intonation when all their chords
> come out right - it's more complicated than that.
>
A choral director friend of mine, who has made a bit of a specialty of the
subtleties of tuning, once remarked that "brass players [playing in
harmony] always tune the major third flat, and string players always tune
it slightly sharp - and they _both_ sound right!"
Any takers for that one?
Tony Patriarche
barry finn
The harsh treatment of sailors by the only law of the sea (like the only
law west of the Pacos), was very exceptable in the society of those times.
Toeing the line (toes aline with decking, for a watch or two), whip into
line, etc, all terms of persuading (nine lives of a cat), Captain
Rogers was hung, Captain Bly like Columbus was honored with a govenorship.
Barry
Greg Bullough <gr...@netcom.com> wrote in article
<gregEHH...@netcom.com>...
> In article <cUd$JuAjbs...@cavendish.demon.co.uk> Chris Ryall
<ch...@cavendish.deiimon.co.uk> writes:
> >>with it.
> >I suspect we did flogging rather better than they did (not just dead
> >horses). Especially in the British *Royal* Navy by all accounts.
>
> The British Navy had a different set of problems than did the
> American Navy. They were strained for personnel between 1750
> and 1850 and thus 'pressed' (we call it 'drafted') all manner
> of unwilling conscripts, many of questionable character. Bringing
> them into line and keeping them in line in the absence of a shore-side
> penal system was a nightmare. Which is why it seems that all of
> the Articles of War seem to have concluded with '...shall suffer
> death.'
>
> It isn't like there was a lot of space on those vessels for
> a confinement of miscreants. In fact, it is from flogging that
> we get the phrase 'not enough room here to swing a cat.' When
> all hands were mustered on deck 'to witness punishment' it
> was so crowded that it might be difficult for the bosun to
> swing the cat o' nine tails without whacking the wrong chap.
>
> Also, from the practice, we have the phrase 'the cat is out
> of the bag' as the 'cat' was kept in a traditional bag in
> a safe place. Hence it meant that there was going to be
> trouble. Only later did it get transformed into meaning
> that some secret was now out.
>
> Flogging was less common on merchant vessels (of which the
> Maryanne of 'Andrew Rose' fame was one) not because corporal
> punishment was unheard of. But rather, because they lacked
> the staid formality of the British Navy. Blows were delivered
> by a kick, a whack with a rope-end, or a smack with a belaying
> pin. Naval officers ruled by strength of law; merchant officers
> by main toughness and loyalty by the bosun's mates to the
> officers.
>
> The US Navy was a considerably looser affair until the turn-of-the
> 20th century. At some levels, it was more like a merchant fleet.
>
> Greg
>
Arcadiamax
In article <61jhni$5...@necco.harvard.edu>, j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost )
writes:
>>> How much traditional music, from anywhere in the world, can you cite
>>> that changes key midpiece????
(Jack Campin writes)
>>Change of mode and accordingly tonal centre while keeping the same notes
>>is pretty common in Scottish music.
(ghost writes)
>I know it is *now*, but do you think it was common way-back-when (200 years
>ago, not 2000). The Scottish/British/Irish-derived old-time American music
>I'm
>familiar with, both acapella & instrumental, does not traditionally change
>key/tonal center.
Extract from the September 'Piping Times', article by Dugald B. MacNeill:
" It (Beloved Scotland) is an unusual tune, one of very few piobaireachds
where a melody is repeated one note up or down - something that is quite
common in ceol beag (note: all other bagpipe music but piobaireachd) , for
example in that fine reel Mrs Macpherson of Inveran. The only other
piobaireachds that come to mind with this repeitition of melody one note up
or down are In the Praise of Marion, Mary's Praise and The Battle of
Waternish. (para.) However, mentioning Mrs Macpherson of Inveran does bring
to mind Lament for The Children (note: generally regarded as one of the
greatest piobaireachds)........and in that great piobaireachd there is
almost a repetition of the melody one note down but that repeat is
constrained to fit reasonably into the pentatonic scale used".
Even if not common, the answer appears to be, yes they did change
key/tonal centre 200 years and more ago. It seems obvious that this would
happen on a fixed-drone instrument, it's the kind of thing musicians can't
resist trying. IMHO they didn't do it as a clever compositional wheeze,
they did it because it was there and they liked the sound.
(snip, Ghost writes)
> the problem is that almost everybody except those devoted to
>old-time American stuff iron-outs & adapts & modernizes the quirks in the
>tunes they work into their repertoire.
This is quite obviously not true for Irish, English, Scottish, Breton,
Cape Breton and Norwegian traditional, at least. Any folk musician who does
not read music fluently or who plays without music will inherit and
spontaneously produce quirks of their own, which, let us not forget, is
what it's all about.
This 'tuning' thread has been an object lesson in the basic chasm between
'head' music and 'ears' music. No amount of technical analysis or musical
education will enable a person to adequately describe folk music, because
those descriptive systems were designed with a different universe in mind
which tends to follow the rules - folk music is a world of exceptions.
Employing a musicologist to analyse folk music is like sending a plumber to
fix the car - they need the work and they might have a pretty good idea
what's wrong but they have the wrong tools for the job.
Max
************************************************
~~ Arcadia Music Agency Surrey England ~~
~~~ Live Music for Functions and Events ~~~
~ Website: http://www.musi.co.uk/index.htm ~
************************************************
ghost
In article <19971010095...@ladder02.news.aol.com> arcad...@aol.com (Arcadiamax) writes:
->Even if not common, the answer appears to be, yes they did change
->key/tonal centre 200 years and more ago. It seems obvious that this would
->happen on a fixed-drone instrument, it's the kind of thing musicians can't
->resist trying. IMHO they didn't do it as a clever compositional wheeze,
->they did it because it was there and they liked the sound.
>(snip, Ghost writes)
>> the problem is that almost everybody except those devoted to
>>old-time American stuff iron-outs & adapts & modernizes the quirks in the
>>tunes they work into their repertoire.
->This is quite obviously not true for Irish, English, Scottish, Breton,
->Cape Breton and Norwegian traditional, at least.
I was talking specifically about people who try to reproduce the
old-time American stuff. I went on to give examples, which you've deleted
from the passage excerpted, of people who *are* trying to faithfully reproduce
the same old-time American stuff but don't have the player physically present
to demonstrate tuning, bowing, etc.
I will say, however, that in the many forms of music you bring up above
(except for the Norwegian because I've only heard traditionally-modelled
Norwegian, & not that much of it), I've heard players from all camps:
faithful reproducers, intentional modernizers, & inadvertant modernizers.
->Any folk musician who does
->not read music fluently or who plays without music will inherit and
->spontaneously produce quirks of their own, which, let us not forget, is
->what it's all about.
->This 'tuning' thread has been an object lesson in the basic chasm between
->'head' music and 'ears' music. No amount of technical analysis or musical
->education will enable a person to adequately describe folk music, because
->those descriptive systems were designed with a different universe in mind
->which tends to follow the rules - folk music is a world of exceptions.
->Employing a musicologist to analyse folk music is like sending a plumber to
->fix the car - they need the work and they might have a pretty good idea
->what's wrong but they have the wrong tools for the job.
Agreed, but I'd like to see more folk-musician-musicologists; people who
are immersed in a traditional music, &, most importantly, like what it
*sounds* like before they try to analyze it. I think they'd have a much better
grip on what is musically "right" & "wrong" for that tradition.
The Sacred Harp singings I've been going to up north here often import
a traditional singer to give a talk & be the honored guest of the singing.
Time after time I've heard the traditional-singer guest answer questions
with "We don't do it that way, but you can do it any way you like".
Inevitably, the people asking ignore the 1st part of the answer & take the
2nd part of the answer to be an endorsement of their style variances, rather
than a case of the honored guest being characteristically polite to their
hosts (they're just as polite to *their* guests, of course, which compounds
problem of getting a straight answer to anything).
ghost
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>>> j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>>>: What I want to know is whether the people discussing these tunings
>>>: actually measured the ratios of the subsequent pitches to the
>>>: "fundamental" (lowest note), or whether they just described them as
>>>: being sharp or flat with regards to Western European tuning, just *or*
>>>: tempered?
>>> I have no idea which writings of which musicologists you're talking about,
>> The ones *you* were talking about in your article, the ones you said found
>>wide variations in the tuning on pre-British-regulation Scottish Highland
>>bagpipes, & among Cape Beton fiddlers. You mentioned them, & repeated
>>their less-than-informative observations. so you must know whom you're
>>talking about.
>I gave the name: Seumas MacNeill.
I don't believe you gave the name in your original posting, or I'd have
cited it. You did give the name several postings later.
>It had never occurred to me to think of
>the most influential figure in the piping world in the last 100 years or so
>as a "musicologist", but if you want to see him that way, fine. I haven't
>seen his original report and I'm not sure if it was published; some of the
>numbers are quoted in Francis Collinson's "Bagpipe, Fiddle and Harp", others
>(I think) in Collinson's larger book on bagpipes which I don't have handy,
>and which also contains frequency measurements for other kinds of European
>bagpipe. (If I recall it right, Highland pipes have the least standardized
>scale of any in Europe).
>>> There are some notes of the highland bagpipe scale that have no low-order
>>> (i.e. audible) harmonic relationship whatever to the tonic; just look at
>>> Seumas MacNeill's measurements. With 22 cents of variation between
>>> different pipers' idea of the same note of the scale, how could any
>>> coherent harmonic effect be intended?
What I'm asking is whether the **ratios between adjacent notes** on pipes
used by different pipers in the days before British standardization
of the pipes were actually as highly idiosyncratic
as you are saying that MacNeill is saying.
You made an analogous statement about the scales used by old-time Cape Breton
fiddlers, & I can honestly say I don't hear old-time Cape Breton fiddlers
using wildly differing scales from each other. But then I haven't heard
*that* many **old-time** Cape Breton fiddlers. I also haven't heard old-time
Appalachian & related styles fiddlers using wildly differing scales from
each other, & I've heard a *few* more of them. And I haven't heard singers
of old-time Appalachian & related styles, which is what I concentrate on
(many of the people doing this singing today are in the deep south; its
died out in much of Appalachia) using wildly differing scales from each
other, either.
As for pegging your scale on a tonic, fundamental, or
whatever-you-can-call-it "starter-note" that may not correspond to any
value on the current European scale & *building* it from there, i.e.
using whatever ratios you're instinctively (I don't mean to suggest that
anyone works out the math 1st) building your scale by to multiply that
"off-the-European-classical-map" starter-note ; I've heard a *lot* of that.
If all these pipers & fiddlers *were* using wildly differing
idiosyncratic scales (& I trust you will dig up the ratios to prove it if
they were recorded), to what would you (or MacNeill) ascribe the
"uniformity of style" they acheive? If the scales *were* very different,
shouldn't that have made the examples of the supposedly-same piece played on
differing sets of pipes sound wildly different from each other? I know there
*are* huge *stylistic* differences between pipers, then & now, but you're
talking note-choice differences so big people might not realize they were
supposed to be hearing the same tune. (Many times I can recognize a tune when
its in a different mode, but sometimes the note-choices available are different
enough that it really does change the character of the tune enough to make it
hard to identify.)
Is it possible MacNeill could have been judging "pipes built to play in mode X"
as though they were "pipes built to play in mode Y" & vice-versa? If this guy
is "the most influential figure in the piping world in the past 100 years",
as you say, I find it hard to believe he wouldn't be able to tell
mode-specific instruments apart from each other.
cbw
In article <61gu07$f...@necco.harvard.edu>, ghost _
<j...@deas.harvard.edu> writes
>I've got a jerk over on rec.music.early I'd like you to explain this to.
>Patience is required. But you both speak the same "early-music-speak"
>most of the time, so you should get
along
the time?
--
Diane
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
[ description of Seumas MacNeill's measurements of Highland pipe tunings as
quoted by Francis Collinson ]
>>>> There are some notes of the highland bagpipe scale that have no low-order
>>>> (i.e. audible) harmonic relationship whatever to the tonic; just look at
>>>> Seumas MacNeill's measurements. With 22 cents of variation between
>>>> different pipers' idea of the same note of the scale, how could any
>>>> coherent harmonic effect be intended?
> What I'm asking is whether the **ratios between adjacent notes** on pipes
> used by different pipers in the days before British standardization
> of the pipes were actually as highly idiosyncratic as you are saying that
> MacNeill is saying.
Of course. You wouldn't be so condescending as to suggest that any
responsible scholar would confuse absolute and relative pitch, would you?
Things are still no more standardized than they need to be. The pitches
are not only variable between sets of pipes, they vary between pipers
according to how they like to set their pipes up, and they vary from week
to week with the *same* piper, depending on what they feel like just then.
If you want to switch from ceol beg to piobaireachd, you need different
reeds, and that changes the tuning (and not in a systematic, reproducible
way). Look at a practically-oriented piping text or periodical, see what
sorts of monkeying about with the instrument are generally felt needful,
and think about the implications.
> As for pegging your scale on a tonic, fundamental, or whatever-you-can-
> call-it "starter-note" that may not correspond to any value on the current
> European scale & *building* it from there, i.e. using whatever ratios
> you're instinctively (I don't mean to suggest that anyone works out the
> math 1st) building your scale by to multiply that "off-the-European-
> classical-map" starter-note ; I've heard a *lot* of that.
Since the current "European classical map" includes tuning systems ranging
from A=409 (early French Baroque, I think) to A=460 (Spanish Renaissance) -
and you can buy fixed-pitch instruments for all those options - this does
not make a whole lot of sense. (It could be worse. There is one cantata
by Bach that he wrote for a church whose organ whose basic pitch was a tone
sharp because the organ builder could save on expensive metal that way and
had basically swindled the congregation into thinking this was normal. The
result is a piece that gives singers and instrumentalists a real interesting
time when they try to do the notes Bach wrote, because the standard edition
doesn't decompensate for his one-off solution). The Highland pipe A is now,
and has always been, somewhere near an A=440 B flat. The fact that the
fundamental pitch is not named the same way as in classical music has been
common knowledge for about 200 years. Probably A was picked because it makes
the pipe scale fit the treble-clef staff fairly well, though a better option
is a four-line staff, as used in Gregorian chant and in one eighteenth century
Border piper's tunebook (the William Dixon Manuscript in Perth Library,
recently published; there's an all-day meeting about it in a few weeks, with
performances by several bands including the wonderfully named Eel Grinders -
I'll post more about this later).
> If all these pipers & fiddlers *were* using wildly differing idiosyncratic
> scales (& I trust you will dig up the ratios to prove it if they were
> recorded),
No - go read Collinson, you might learn something.
> to what would you (or MacNeill) ascribe the "uniformity of style" they
> acheive?
The unifying features of Highland piping style have little to do with
precise pitch. For solo performance: get your drones in tune with the
chanter A, fiddle with the reed and maybe some tape to get the E accurate,
and you're away. The other notes can be all over the place and nobody'll
notice. Fingering and blowing are what count.
> If the scales *were* very different, shouldn't that have made the examples
> of the supposedly-same piece played on differing sets of pipes sound wildly
> different from each other?
No, because most of the harmonic interactions don't matter to the overall
sound.
What I think is going on here is that all musics, outside societies at an
early Palaeolithic level, have some kind of virtuoso element. There are
many aspects of music that can be the subject of out-of-the-ordinary
displays of control to amaze the punters or challenge the performers; sheer
muscular strength and stamina (Kodo drummers), timbral variation (didgeridoo
players or overtone singers), pitch control (Indian classical singers or the
kinds of folk polyphony ghost is most interested in), simultaneous dramatic
rendition (shamanistic myth reenactments and Western opera), or finger agility
(Indian tabla playing and the Highland pipes). It is asking too much of the
human frame and the span of human life to attain virtuosity in all of these
at once. A musical culture that places extreme value on finger agility is
going to let something else go, and for the pipes it's precise pitching.
(Most pipers, when playing solo, would rate reproducible timbre as more
important than reproducible pitch).
> I know there *are* huge *stylistic* differences between pipers, then & now,
> but you're talking note-choice differences so big people might not realize
> they were supposed to be hearing the same tune.
This never happens. You've only got nine notes (and maybe even less, many
old tunes are pentatonic); it's easy to figure out which ones are which.
The gracings alone would tell a clued-up listener which notes were being
played even in the total absence of pitch information about the melody notes;
they are specific to particular contexts.
> (Many times I can recognize a tune when its in a different mode, but
> sometimes the note-choices available are different enough that it really
> does change the character of the tune enough to make it hard to identify.)
> Is it possible MacNeill could have been judging "pipes built to play in
> mode X" as though they were "pipes built to play in mode Y" & vice-versa?
No way. All pipes play in the same mode (when "in A", nearer to Mixolydian
than to any other mode in art-music theory), and always have done. I doubt
you could change the basic mode of the Highland pipes to an equally near
approximation of one the other classical modes and still have a playable
instrument; the finger spacings would be weird. Besides, these variants of
tuning are not all preset at the time the pipes are built; fiddling with the
chanter reed has about as much effect as anything a maker is likely to do in
varying the hole spacings.
> If this guy is "the most influential figure in the piping world in the
> past 100 years", as you say, I find it hard to believe he wouldn't be
> able to tell mode-specific instruments apart from each other.
Quite. And it's *was*, the curmudgeonly old bastard died last year. He
was a professor of physics at Glasgow University; he probably devoted
more time to piping than to his real job, as he founded the College of
Piping in Glasgow and stayed in charge of it (full-time after his
retirement) until the end. The College still exists, despite the efforts
of the new massively-funded Piping Centre to absorb it like one of the
larger and slimier things out of H.P. Lovecraft when confronted with
something small and pink. (They were trying that on even when Seumas was
still alive).
The current issue of _Piping Times_ (the College of Piping's magazine) has
a magnificently disgusting set of suggestions for DIY instrument building.
Perhaps nearer to alt.tasteless material than the usual fare for this group.
Recommended.
ghost
>In article <28...@purr.demon.co.uk> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>>>> There are some notes of the highland bagpipe scale that have no low-order
>>>> (i.e. audible) harmonic relationship whatever to the tonic; just look at
>>>> Seumas MacNeill's measurements. With 22 cents of variation between
>>>> different pipers' idea of the same note of the scale, how could any
>>>> coherent harmonic effect be intended?
>What I'm asking is whether the **ratios between adjacent notes** on pipes
>used by different pipers in the days before British standardization
>of the pipes were actually as highly idiosyncratic
>as you are saying that MacNeill is saying.
>If all these pipers & fiddlers *were* using wildly differing
>idiosyncratic scales (& I trust you will dig up the ratios to prove it if
>they were recorded), to what would you (or MacNeill) ascribe the
>"uniformity of style" they acheive? If the scales *were* very different,
>shouldn't that have made the examples of the supposedly-same piece played on
>differing sets of pipes sound wildly different from each other? I know there
>*are* huge *stylistic* differences between pipers, then & now, but you're
>talking note-choice differences so big people might not realize they were
>supposed to be hearing the same tune. (Many times I can recognize a tune when
>its in a different mode, but sometimes the note-choices available are different
>enough that it really does change the character of the tune enough to make it
>hard to identify.)
I'm going to run this one either to the ground or into it, as per usual:
If it turns out (providing you can find measured ratios) that each of those
pipers MacNeil studied *did* have different ratios between their notes, &
if it turns out you explain it away as "pipes made to play in a couple
different modes" because no 2 sets of ratios turn out to be the same or
even very similar, how *would* you explain how the pipers chose their
ratios? If its just by chance: "Oops the awl slipped, better put the next
hole here anyway" you're going to get some awfully weird-sounding pipes.
It would be hard to play any recognizable tunes on them.
If on the other hand, there turns out to be a *number* of sets of ratios that
each will give you hole placement such that the tunes you play magically sound
like they're, say, in Dorian or Mixolydian mode, even though only one or two
of those sets of ratios correspond to the values used today for
("just", or untempered) Dorian or Mixolydian mode, wouldn't you say that
supports what I'm claiming about "families of harmonics that go together
to make scales used in traditional music"? Even if you're not going to
play the notes together harmonically (though you *are*; you will play each
one against a continuously-sounding set of drones that you agree *are*
harmonic with *one* note on the chanter; I contend the drones are harmonic
with *all* the notes, or the music wouldn't sound as good as it does),
if you get a scale on which you have the note-ratios to play recognizable
tunes in a recognizable mode, would you agree that that means there is
more than one way to organize scale ratios & come up with something that
your brain recognizes as "proportionally right for Mixolydian, or for
Dorian" even if the recognizable steps turn out to be in different places?
It would certainly generalize the definition of a mode.
Its late, the machine here is responding very slowly, I think I'll quit
while I'm behind & I really would like to know what scale ratios MacNeill
measured.
Arcadiamax
>Damn few Burns tunes work on the pipes at all. You need more than nine
>notes, or a *different* nine notes. You will occasionally find some
>schlocky military arrangement of one in a regimental tunebook, but they
>invariably sound vastly better on what they were originally intended for,
>be it voice, fiddle or flute.
Agreed generally - however, the following don't work too badly IMHO:
The Rigs O' Barley (Tune:Corn Rigs)
A Man's a Man for A' That
The Rowan Tree (OK so the pipe high G natural is different, but sounds
fine to folk ears)
Bonnie Dundee: bearable
MacPherson's Farewell
Duncan Gray
Bruce's Address
Regards, Max
ghost
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>> The songs Jean Redpath usually introduces as "songs Burns tried to *save*
>> by putting words to" are set to pipe tunes, are *not* easily-singable songs,
>> & are most of them not songs that have entered any tradition as songs,
>> despite Burns' intentions.
->Rather few Burns tunes had anything to do with the pipes in his lifetime.
->His instrument was the fiddle; where he borrowed an instrumental tune it
->was usually for that, and when he notated a song, he did it from the fiddle.
->(From the comments he makes on being blown away by the oboist Fraser's
->playing, it seems he wasn't a very expressive fiddler himself and hadn't
->had much contact with fiddlers who could play slow airs well).
>> Redpath happily mentions that a lot of these tunes aren't easily singable;
>> she says you need an extra lung (presumably giving you enough air to sing
>> double- & triple-speed), which she of course then demonstrates that she has
>> (& which most of the rest of us don't).
->They also sometimes have a much wider range than the pipes, which makes them
->even more of a bastard to sing.
>> She does usually comment that most of these tunes seem to have been
>> preserved in the piping tradition, despite Burns' worries that pipers
>> were a dying breed. I wouldn't disparage the view Burns had from his
>> era of the piping of traditional Scottish material being a dying tradition
>> as an egomaniacal excuse for appropriating the pipe tunes;
->Damn few Burns tunes work on the pipes at all. You need more than nine
->notes, or a *different* nine notes. You will occasionally find some
->schlocky military arrangement of one in a regimental tunebook, but they
->invariably sound vastly better on what they were originally intended for,
->be it voice, fiddle or flute. Opening my copy of the OUP _Poems & Songs_
->at random, and starting at #229 sometime in 1789:
<examples deleted>
>> he probably looked around him & didn't see very many people aspiring to
>> learn to be traditional pipers.
->He was at the wrong end of the country for that. I doubt you have many
->people aspiring to be part of a Caribbean steel band in Boston, either;
->Trinidad is about as accessible from where you are as the Highlands was
->to Burns.
There are probably quite a few aspiring steel band players in Boston;
there's a large Carribean community here.
->There were immigrant pipers in Edinburgh in Burns's time, but
->no structure for teaching new players, nor had there ever been. But there
->was no sign of the fiddle and flute going out of fashion; and since those
->were what most of the instrumental traditional music he knew had been played
->on for the preceding 100 years, what was there to worry about?
All I can say is that I'm quoting Jean Redpath's information given over the
course of several years of Burns Nights, & that you & she have some talking
together to do.
Abby Sale
On 9 Oct 1997 13:10:58 GMT, ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) wrote:
>
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
etc.
Three points you may wish to comment on:
1) Dick, (if I recall) indicates Burns objected to the "Lang Syne" tune
change and eventually got it changed back to his original in later
publications.
2) I'm not at all sure it's fair to suggest he totally failed or
suppressed the bawdy trad material. Much that is suggestive to risque got
into his parlour works and he did produce _Merry Muses_, some of which is
from tradition. His notes are extensive and I understood there was much
information on which songs were rewritten.
3) It has been claimed that, in fact, _none_ of Burns' originals or
"improvements" ever went into tradition despite his desires or his
"National Poet" status.
-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- ---
I am Abby Sale - abby...@orlinter.com (That's in Orlando)
Peter Wilton
Arcadiamax <arcad...@aol.com> writes
>This 'tuning' thread has been an object lesson in the basic chasm between
Which descriptive systems? If you mean 19th century musicology which
was designed to "prove" that German Classical/Romantic of the 18th-19th
centuries was the only music worth consideration, then that would
probably be true. If you mean those musicologists who, because of
ethnomusicology and newer analytical systems, are challenging older
forms of analysis, probably not true. As for a chasm, it is precisely the
discovery that there is no chasm between the various traditions within the
one musical field which has been responsible for eroding the triumphalism
of traditional forms of music analysis. Nor has the erosion of the notion
of a chasm come only from musicology, but from cultural and social
critiques, e.g. Dave Harker calling "folksong" "fakesong", in his critique of
the ideological implication behind the turn of the century collector's
activities. These have been picked up on by musicologists too.
Middleton's _Studying Popular Music_, which I'm reading now, takes
Harker's ideas as read, and is also well aware of the importance of the
individual performance, and therefore the exceptional. But of course, in
order for the "exceptional" to be perceptible in a musical expression, it
implies some sort of "norm" against which it can be perceived as a
departure. One of the things that comes out of Middleton, therefore, is
understanding the relationship between the "norm" and the "exceptional".
--
Peter Wilton
The Gregorian Association Web Page:
http://www.beaufort.demon.co.uk/chant.htm
ghost
In article <xKvRzFAM...@beaufort.demon.co.uk> Peter Wilton <pj...@beaufort.demon.co.uk> writes:
>Arcadiamax <arcad...@aol.com> writes
->>this 'tuning' thread has been an object lesson in the basic chasm between
->>'head' music and 'ears' music. No amount of technical analysis or musical
->>education will enable a person to adequately describe folk music, because
->>those descriptive systems were designed with a different universe in mind
->>which tends to follow the rules - folk music is a world of exceptions.
->>Employing a musicologist to analyse folk music is like sending a plumber to
->>fix the car - they need the work and they might have a pretty good idea
->>what's wrong but they have the wrong tools for the job.
#>Which descriptive systems? If you mean 19th century musicology which
#>was designed to "prove" that German Classical/Romantic of the 18th-19th
#>centuries was the only music worth consideration, then that would
#>probably be true. If you mean those musicologists who, because of
#>ethnomusicology and newer analytical systems, are challenging older
#>forms of analysis, probably not true.
To my knowledge more-modern ethnomusicologists & musicologists are still
in the practise of relating all traditional music, wherever in the world
its comes from, to absolutes dictated by European classical music.
A good example is the practise of describing traditional scale degrees
as "semitones" & "quartertones", & "a little sharp & a little flat"
despite that they don't reflect the relation to
European classical scale degrees that that terminology implies.
They will have to adopt a scientifically precise, culture-free language of
description before they convince me they're free of European classical taint.
(You can refer to scientific measurements in terms of grams, kilometers &
so forth, & still retain recipes & utensils for cooking in cups & pints,
& road directions in feet & miles; no-one's stopping you, they're just
telling you your units of measurement are not universally recognized
or universally useful.)
ghost
>3) It has been claimed that, in fact, _none_ of Burns' originals or
>"improvements" ever went into tradition despite his desires or his
>"National Poet" status.
I've heard that over & over (& probably from Jean Redpath on Burns Nights,
too). People did not stand around in pubs or fields in the Scottish lowlands
(Burns' original home) singing "Ae Fond Kiss", however much Burns wanted them
to. It was all Scottish parlor-society renditions that got sung, in Scottish
parlor society, & they probably sounded, despite Campin's claims for the *fans*
as well as the author of "Rosina", a great deal like those modern-day
"European classical for people with a smaller vocal range" renditions I abhor.
However, some modern-day Scottish folk-revivalists, some of whom have gen-u-ine
traditional singers among their close antecedents (such as their parents),
do throw in a Burns song or two among their renditions of traditional ballads.
Its funny; on this list years ago we had people claiming that Si Kahn's
"Aragon Mill" is really an old Irish folk song entitled "Belfast Mill", &
we've had reports of people who have never heard of Stan Rogers singing
Stan Rogers' songs & taking them for traditional songs, changing the words,
etc. Maybe because Burns made *such* am impact as "the peasant poet" or
whatever the snoots of the time liked to call him, & because his songs in
Scotland & England went *directly* into songbooks to be taught in schools
in parlor-society style (no-one try to tell me they don't still teach that;
Cilla Fisher several years ago at the New England Eisteddfod gave some
hysterical examples of what her school-teachers informed her "real" singing
was, as opposed to her family's style) people rebelled against adopting
them into the tradition. You *couldn't* pretend you didn't know Burns
wrote those particular sets of words. It would be like claiming Shakespeare
to be some unknown poet.
ghost
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>> What I'm asking is whether the **ratios between adjacent notes** on pipes
>> used by different pipers in the days before British standardization
>> of the pipes were actually as highly idiosyncratic as you are saying that
>> MacNeill is saying.
>Of course. You wouldn't be so condescending as to suggest that any
>responsible scholar would confuse absolute and relative pitch, would you?
Hopefully not of an expert on bagpipe music, but I know about 500
European-classical-style choral singers, many of them music-school teachers,
choir directors, orchestral musicians & the like, who have chosen as their
goof-off hobby singing music (Sacred Harp) where no-one drills them on pitch
(although they *are* given starting pitches, which they all disregard)
who apparently *don't* know the difference.
>The unifying features of Highland piping style have little to do with
>precise pitch. For solo performance: get your drones in tune with the
>chanter A, fiddle with the reed and maybe some tape to get the E accurate,
>and you're away. The other notes can be all over the place and nobody'll
>notice. Fingering and blowing are what count.
So you're saying here that people will just be so blown away
(ulp) by your fingering & blowing that they won't be paying attention
to pitch variation?
You could just as easily say, using the same arguments, that by
fingering & blowing you'll bring those out-of-synch-as-drilled-into-the-chanter
notes into line.
>> If the scales *were* very different, shouldn't that have made the examples
>> of the supposedly-same piece played on differing sets of pipes sound wildly
>> different from each other?
>No, because most of the harmonic interactions don't matter to the overall
>sound.
They do matter to me (I repeat: You've got a continuous set of drones,
& some long-held melody notes played against them; harmonic interactions
*do* matter), & I *don't* hear them as being wincingly out-of-tune
with each other. Whereas among those choral singers, all singing
supposed harmony while being in about as many seperate keys as you can define,
I do a lot of wincing.
>Besides, these variants of
>tuning are not all preset at the time the pipes are built; fiddling with the
>chanter reed has about as much effect as anything a maker is likely to do in
>varying the hole spacings.
Then aren't you (& MacNeil) then being a little lax in just discussing
hole-placement without taking into consideration the effect of the the
reed (which on an antique instrument may not be in the condition it would
have to be in to have an instrument playable by the original player's
standards). As you more-or-less discuss above & in previous articles,
the player can also change pitch of the various holes by artful fingering
& by putting something more permanent than their fingers, such as
sticky-tape (probably would have been wax in previous eras) over part
of the holes. What you wind up with is an instrument that the player
essentially tunes on the fly. Which makes any attempt to analyze the
tuning from studying hole-placement alone an attempt lacking necessary
information.
[It also makes me wonder a lot about those people who are trying to determine
things about Paleolithic scales & playing techniques from examining
bone whistles that have been buried in the ground, eroding away,
for about 10,000 years.]
Tom Gruning
ghost (j...@endor.harvard.edu) wrote:
: >Arcadiamax <arcad...@aol.com> writes
: ->>this 'tuning' thread has been an object lesson in the basic chasm between
: ->>'head' music and 'ears' music. No amount of technical analysis or musical
: ->>education will enable a person to adequately describe folk music, because
: ->>those descriptive systems were designed with a different universe in mind
: ->>which tends to follow the rules - folk music is a world of exceptions.
: ->>Employing a musicologist to analyse folk music is like sending a plumber to
: ->>fix the car - they need the work and they might have a pretty good idea
: ->>what's wrong but they have the wrong tools for the job.
: #>Which descriptive systems? If you mean 19th century musicology which
: #>was designed to "prove" that German Classical/Romantic of the 18th-19th
: #>centuries was the only music worth consideration, then that would
: #>probably be true. If you mean those musicologists who, because of
: #>ethnomusicology and newer analytical systems, are challenging older
: #>forms of analysis, probably not true.
: To my knowledge more-modern ethnomusicologists & musicologists are still
: in the practise of relating all traditional music, wherever in the world
: its comes from, to absolutes dictated by European classical music.
Your knowledge of what ethnomusicologists are doing is a good 15 or 20
years (minimum) behind current ethnographic trends.
: A good example is the practise of describing traditional scale degrees
: as "semitones" & "quartertones", & "a little sharp & a little flat"
: despite that they don't reflect the relation to
: European classical scale degrees that that terminology implies.
: They will have to adopt a scientifically precise, culture-free language of
: description before they convince me they're free of European classical taint.
Actually...30 years is more like it. The phrase "sciencing about music"
was coined first (I believe) by Alan Merriam in "The Anthropology of
Music" which was published in 1964.
There is no "culture-free" language. Even mathamatics has it's share of
cultural baggage.
: (You can refer to scientific measurements in terms of grams, kilometers &
: so forth, & still retain recipes & utensils for cooking in cups & pints,
: & road directions in feet & miles; no-one's stopping you, they're just
: telling you your units of measurement are not universally recognized
: or universally useful.)
I'm not sure who "They" are. There are no "universally recognized" or
"universally useful" units of measurement..(?) I'm really not quite sure
what you are trying to say.
Best,
Tom Gruning
Jack Campin
abby...@orlinter.com (Abby Sale) writes:
> Three points you may wish to comment on:
> 1) Dick, (if I recall) indicates Burns objected to the "Lang Syne" tune
> change and eventually got it changed back to his original in later
> publications.
I'll check the full story next week. (Meanwhile, I was at a conference
today on popular culture in 18th century Scotland; one talk was on a
fiddler's tunebook from Galloway compiled in the 1790s. The speaker (Jo
Miller) brought it along. Shield's _Rosina_ tune was in there).
> 2) I'm not at all sure it's fair to suggest he totally failed or
> suppressed the bawdy trad material. Much that is suggestive to
> risque got into his parlour works and he did produce _Merry Muses_,
> some of which is from tradition.
Traditional does not coincide with obscene, in the way we'd understand it
now. There are *some* traditional pieces in the Merry Muses but they're
drowned out by the volume of macho misogynistic rugby-song crap written to
keep gentleman yahoos amused; what made a piece completely unpublishable
was not the acts described in it but the values expressed - and the values
of the labouring classes were not those of the people who formed Burns's
direct audience. Libidinousness wasn't the problem, sexual autonomy was.
(One text that virtually nobody could bring themselves to quote in print
after David Herd found it: the stunning final couplet of his version of
_When she came ben she bobbed_/_The Laird of Cockpen_, which unlike any of
the later ones, Burns's included, is spoken directly from the viewpoint of
the woman miner:
Oh are you wi bairn, my chicken?
Oh are you wi bairn, my chicken?
Oh if I am not, I hope to be,
Ere the green leaves be shaken.
This was known to most 19th century adaptors and commentators - Susan
Ferrier's appendix to the song alludes to it - and the comments they
make on it are absolutely priceless, running through the whole lexicon
of bourgeois disgust with proletarian values and modes of expression,
without ever being able to name what it is that horrifies them so much).
He took three different attitudes depending on the market he was writing
for - nearest to a folk collector when working with Johnson, nearer to a
salon-music arranger for Thomson, or filling the role Durfey and Playford
had done before when writing the _Merry Muses_.
> His notes are extensive and I understood there was much information
> on which songs were rewritten.
Unfortunately it's often not *useful* information, stuff that would let
you reconstruct the original. He always takes an evaluative stance,
deciding what is worth keeping and what not. Fair enough for a poet or
a performer, not what we expect of someone trying to do future generations
a service as a collector for times when tastes might have changed. Herd
comes across as a much more modern figure that way.
> 3) It has been claimed that, in fact, _none_ of Burns' originals or
> "improvements" ever went into tradition despite his desires or his
> "National Poet" status.
I'd nominate:
1. Auld Lang Syne. If that isn't in the tradition I don't know what is.
2. Ye Jacobites by Name. Maybe not wildly popular in his own time but
it is now. The tune didn't need his help, though; _Henry Hall_ was
already popular in England, and the American hymn _Wondrous Love_ and
Irish political song _The Praties they Grow Small_ are probably based
on that.
3. Scots Wha Hae. What we used before we had _Flower of Scotland_.
If we'd played Latvia in 1800 or 1950 the whole country would have
known the words to sing it. Didn't hurt that the tune was widely
known before Burns wrote the words.
4. Bannocks of Bear Meal. Popular enough to have been ripped off by
the army, but then it was popular before Burns's version came along.
5. A Red Red Rose. Probably didn't get into tradition except via
Victorian songbooks, but it got there regardless.
6. Tibbie Fowler. Burns didn't do much to this beyond tidy the text
up into something a bit snappier, but his version seems to have
replaced all the pre-existing ones. Didn't stay in the tradition all
that long, though.
7. The Banks o Doon. This is one of those getting-a-free-ride-on-a-
popular-tune songs. As far as I know nobody had put words to _The
Caledonian Hunt's Delight_ before and it was a canny marketing
move to spot the opening. Didn't take long to catch on.
There are a few others. One way I believe you can tell which songs were
popular is by their parodizations; someone taking the piss out of a
public figure is always going to start from something well-known. By
that criterion there are several other Burns songs that everybody knew
in the early 19th century, which is far too early for the schools (the
mechnism "ghost" seems to be suggesting) to have had any effect. The
way Burns's songs were spread was by a mixture of chapbook publication
(Burns poems account for a big fraction of the total space of Scottish
chapbooks, maybe 20% by the 1830s) and performance (the main way people
got to know the tunes). It's perhaps relevant that out of the above list,
_Scots Wha Hae_ is the only completely original composition - all the
rest are adaptations or editorial tidyings-up of pre-existing songs.
The notion of "tradition" is a bit shaky here. Urban Scotland at the time
Burns' work appeared was a literate culture; it would have been a rare
occasion when anybody sang a Burns song without there being someone in the
audience who could read it in a chapbook. But it was an unusual literate
culture in that its common musical language was that of a preliterate world,
a language which kept its vitality for a long time, in fact flourishing
aggressively enough to confidently take on such of the imported art music
of Europe as it met with and incorporate it. Trying to identify a *purely*
oral tradition seems to me to be ignoring the local specificity of Lowland
Scotland and seeing its society through a folklorist's model designed for
the entirely different world of the illiterate peasant cultures of prewar
Sicily or 19th century South Uist.
Peter Wilton
Tom Gruning <tgru...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu> writes
>: To my knowledge more-modern ethnomusicologists & musicologists are still
>: in the practise of relating all traditional music, wherever in the world
>: its comes from, to absolutes dictated by European classical music.
>
>Your knowledge of what ethnomusicologists are doing is a good 15 or 20
>years (minimum) behind current ethnographic trends.
Absolutely. Even Middleton writing on Western popular music devotes
an entire chapter to the limits of traditional musicology in studying it. But
he also deals with the limitations of folkloristic and ethno. studies,
suggesting that the boundary between folk and other musics is artificial,
and derives from a romantic ideology (connected with Harker's
"Fakesong" theme), and suggests that all the ways of looking at "folk"
which supposedly distinguish it from other musics can also be found in
other musics, especially the pop music which is the subject of his book.
Arcadiamax
In article <61qktd$1...@necco.harvard.edu>, j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost )
writes:
>(although they *are* given starting pitches, which they all disregard)
>who apparently *don't* know the difference.
Could someone enlighten me as to what the asterisks (as in *are* and
*don't*) are for?
Yours ignorantly, Max
ghost
In article <61r7p7$44u$1...@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu> tgru...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Tom Gruning) writes:
>ghost (j...@endor.harvard.edu) wrote:
+>: To my knowledge more-modern ethnomusicologists & musicologists are still
+>: in the practise of relating all traditional music, wherever in the world
+>: its comes from, to absolutes dictated by European classical music.
->Your knowledge of what ethnomusicologists are doing is a good 15 or 20
->years (minimum) behind current ethnographic trends.
I've met a very few people with ethnomusicology degrees who don't relate
everything European classical music. Those few are usually found over on
irtrad-l (the Irish traditional music mailing list), & even most of them
still insist on using European classical terminology, even though they don't
insist Irish traditional music conform to European classical formulae.
+>: A good example is the practise of describing traditional scale degrees
+>: as "semitones" & "quartertones", & "a little sharp & a little flat"
+>: despite that they don't reflect the relation to
+>: European classical scale degrees that that terminology implies.
+>: They will have to adopt a scientifically precise, culture-free language of
+>: description before they convince me they're free of European classical taint.
->Actually...30 years is more like it. The phrase "sciencing about music"
->was coined first (I believe) by Alan Merriam in "The Anthropology of
->Music" which was published in 1964.
Then why is everyone still referring to modal music in terminology
devloped for European classical music?
ghost
>In article <61qktd$1...@necco.harvard.edu>, j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost )
>writes:
>
>>(although they *are* given starting pitches, which they all disregard)
>>who apparently *don't* know the difference.
>
>Could someone enlighten me as to what the asterisks (as in *are* and
>*don't*) are for?
I can't italicize or underline in ascii characters (well, I *can*
underline, but to do so would require double-spacing the whole article,
making it even *longer*).
So the asterisks are to indicate that the word encased in asterisks
(boy, trying spelling "asterisks" several times in a row if you're
even a *little* dyslexic) would have been italicized or underlined or
writiten in "bold type" if I could have done so. Some people use
"_word_" instead of asterisks. Most people, probably. Oh well.
I'm putting uk.music.folk back in the headers as its unclear to me what
system you're reading on.
Tom Gruning
ghost (j...@deas.harvard.edu) wrote:
: In article <61r7p7$44u$1...@geraldo.cc.utexas.edu> tgru...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (Tom Gruning) writes:
: >ghost (j...@endor.harvard.edu) wrote:
: +>: To my knowledge more-modern ethnomusicologists & musicologists are still
: +>: in the practise of relating all traditional music, wherever in the world
: +>: its comes from, to absolutes dictated by European classical music.
: ->Your knowledge of what ethnomusicologists are doing is a good 15 or 20
: ->years (minimum) behind current ethnographic trends.
: I've met a very few people with ethnomusicology degrees who don't relate
: everything European classical music. Those few are usually found over on
: irtrad-l (the Irish traditional music mailing list), & even most of them
: still insist on using European classical terminology, even though they don't
: insist Irish traditional music conform to European classical formulae.
So what's the problem with discussing European music in European
teminology? In the West, a meta-language has developed over the last
thousand years or so in order to describe pitch relationships, harmonic
movement, rhythmic relationships etc. Many other music traditions have
their own terminology to describe these same musical phenomenon. If we're
talking about music and using the English language we're pretty well stuck
with discussing it in terms which are recognized as representing various
aspects of these pitch relationships etc.
: +>: A good example is the practise of describing traditional scale degrees
: +>: as "semitones" & "quartertones", & "a little sharp & a little flat"
: +>: despite that they don't reflect the relation to
: +>: European classical scale degrees that that terminology implies.
I'm assuming you are referring to equal temperament when you mention
"European classical scale degrees." If so...equal temperament has only
been the standard for tuning since the early part of the 20th century.
Semitones and quartertones are descriptive terms which are essentially
units of measurement. Would you prefer that we speak in terms of "cents"
or "hertz?" If so...that's not a problem. Frankly, I'm not too sure what
you're trying to say in the above statement. Could you be more specific?
: +>: They will have to adopt a scientifically precise, culture-free language of
: +>: description before they convince me they're free of European classical taint.
: ->Actually...30 years is more like it. The phrase "sciencing about music"
: ->was coined first (I believe) by Alan Merriam in "The Anthropology of
: ->Music" which was published in 1964.
: Then why is everyone still referring to modal music in terminology
: devloped for European classical music?
Prior to the seventeenth century European "classical" music *was* modal.
The music/analytical lexicon was already reasonably well developed at that
point.
All that aside...I'm wondering what sort of terminology you would prefer
to use for music analysis and/or description.
Best,
Tom Gruning
John Garst
In article <01bcd2b3$cce88260$4158b5cf@default>, "Timothy Jaques"
<tja...@netcom.ca> wrote:
...
> What is the name of the classical piece that sounds almost exactly like "Do
> You Ken John Peel"...?
"Pepsi Cola hits the spot," etc.
John Garst ga...@sunchem.chem.uga.edu
Joe Kesselman, yclept Keshlam
In <19971013114...@ladder02.news.aol.com>, arcad...@aol.com (Arcadiamax) writes:
>Could someone enlighten me as to what the asterisks (as in *are* and
>*don't*) are for?
Traditional emphasis technique, somewhere between _this_ and THIS in
amount of emphasis expressed. Used because most news readers don't
support multiple fonts; _underscore_ bracketing is a stand-in for italics,
ALL-UPPERCASE is a stand-in for bold, and so on.
*Asterisks* don't have any fixed meaning other than "I'm emphasizing
this word -- think of it as having been spoken *very* *emphatically*."
_Underscores_ sometimes mean the same thing, but are also used for
book titles and the like (eg _Sing_Out_ magazine) when there's some
risk of the title getting confused with other text.
UPPERCASE is generally taken as "shouting".
Having said all that: 99% of the time you can ignore all of these lexical
markings and the sentences will mean the same thing. And 99% of the
time that you think you might want to use 'em, you should probably instead
take time to calm down before writing.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Joseph J. Kesselman http://pages.prodigy.com/keshlam/
Nov. 8 at Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse:THE WOMEN OF THE CALIBASH.
"This note is a production of Novalabs Consulting, which is solely
responsible for its content. Opinions not necessarily those of IBM."
Peter Wilton
Tom Gruning <tgru...@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu> writes
>Prior to the seventeenth century European "classical" music *was* modal.
>The music/analytical lexicon was already reasonably well developed at that
>point.
A good case in point is the term "dominant", which is used in "functional
tonality", i.e. the music of Mozart et al., where it means the fifth degree
of the scale, and the triad built upon that degree of the scale. But it was
used much earlier for the "recitative-style" chanting of psalms, to refer to
the main reciting note around which the reciting formula is based in any
given mode. In some of these modes this note is a fifth above the
"keynote" of the mode (e.g. Dorian, where the final is on "d", and the
reciting note on the fifth degree of the mode, "a"). Thus there is some
overlap of meaning between the two, and some distinction. Therefore
"classical" music had adopted a term which was originally coined for
something quite different. It doesn't mean that, despite that, the term is
unusable in "classical" music. Quite the reverse, that is now its *normal*,
having largely supplanted the original use.
ghost
>In article <01bcd2b3$cce88260$4158b5cf@default>, "Timothy Jaques"
><tja...@netcom.ca> wrote:
>...
>> What is the name of the classical piece that sounds almost exactly like "Do
>> You Ken John Peel"...?
>"Pepsi Cola hits the spot," etc.
What *have* they been feeding you, Mr.Garst? Even I don't know that one.
On the other hand, it comes to mind (the computer is finally working)
that the beginning of the William Tell Overture sounds a *little* like
"John Peel". Not nearly as interesting though. And I didn't think anyone
was seriously playing "Wm Tell O" anymore (in a previous article T. Jaques
said a station *was* playing the "Peel' sound-alike).
"Wm Tell O" has been the Lone Ranger Theme, & then the Lark Cigarettes Song
("have a Lark have a Lark have a Lark today.
William Tell has had a hard life.
Abby Sale
On 12 Oct 1997 00:17:31 GMT, ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) wrote:
For all that good information, a small comment on a minor (but pet) area:
>
>The notion of "tradition" is a bit shaky here. Urban Scotland at the time
>Burns' work appeared was a literate culture; it would have been a rare
>occasion when anybody sang a Burns song without there being someone in the
>audience who could read it in a chapbook. But it was an unusual literate
>culture in that its common musical language was that of a preliterate world,
>a language which kept its vitality for a long time, in fact flourishing
I suggest this is inaccurate use of "preliterate." That applies to a
society that has not developed a written language and is totally dependent
on memory (and professional memorizers) for its information.
Rural Scotland was long a literate society - fully aware of Biblical &
classical literature and with excellent, if occasional, access to written
sources as well as to urban society and lifestyle. The great majority in
the village may have been illiterate, but that's different. They always
had access to a scribe or a reader. This is not a pickey distinction - as
I say, it's a pet one. It goes to the very essence of a "folk society" at
any location or historical era. My own definition of "folk music," by the
way (And I'm just going to come right out and say it...) is simply and
specifically "The musical culture of a folk society." It's _that_ nature,
not the song's that drives the nature of the whole.
Lastly, I believe it's exactly that literacy and access that contributes
essentially to the greatness of Scots traditional song and the unique
genius of Scots classic ballads. The happy conjoining of a deep
understanding and love and conservative retention of their own "rustic"
tradition - in addition to (possibly sub- or semi-conscious)
intellectualization stemming from literate sources.
ghost
>Having said all that: 99% of the time you can ignore all of these lexical
>markings and the sentences will mean the same thing. And 99% of the
>time that you think you might want to use 'em, you should probably instead
>take time to calm down before writing.
***Who***, ****me*** ???
Actually, I'm more the italics or underline type; bold type isn't my sort
of thing, & certainly not caps; besides, there are still about 2 terminals
left in use in the world somewhere that print responses only in caps, so
its hard for those 2 users to tell if you mean to be shouting at them
(or for you to tell if they mean to be shouting at you).
ghost
>> If all these pipers & fiddlers *were* using wildly differing idiosyncratic
>> scales (& I trust you will dig up the ratios to prove it if they were
>> recorded),
>No - go read Collinson, you might learn something.
You know a library around here that carries him?
Meanwhile, can you point out what Cape Breton fiddlers MacNeill thinks
are in tunings wildly different from each other? I presume MacNeill was
referring to recordings; you can't tell much about tuning from looking a
a picture of a fiddle. I can easily make the request of the local
Maritime-specialty DJ to play these examples for me.
Or what pipers, if there are recorded examples of what MacNeill referred to?
I don't deny that the earlier pipers aren't in European classical tuning;
that's one of my main points, in fact. I just don't hear the early pipers,
fiddlers & singers I *have* heard as being in tunings wildly different from
*each other*. The old-time fiddlers & pipers (mostly Irish Uillean pipers are
what I have historical recordings of) & especially singers (because singers are
what I've heard the most of) I've heard seem grouped around 3 styles,
one more Irish-sounding, one more Scottish-sounding, one more
British-sounding (for want of what I'm sure could be a much better group
of distinctions). I'm talking of course about music that *doesn't* appear
to have a massive input from African-American traditions; that's a whole
huge adjacent field in American old-time music.
ghost
Gruning said:
#>: ->Your knowledge of what ethnomusicologists are doing is a good 15 or 20
#>: ->years (minimum) behind current ethnographic trends.
So I said:
+>: I've met a very few people with ethnomusicology degrees who don't relate
+>: everything to European classical music. Those few are usually found over on
+>: irtrad-l (the Irish traditional music mailing list), & even most of them
+>: still insist on using European classical terminology, even though they don't
+>: insist Irish traditional music conform to European classical formulae.
So Gruning said:
#>So what's the problem with discussing European music in European
#>teminology?
So I say:
The terminology was developed to discuss a very small section of European
music; that of parts of France, parts of Germany, & maybe of Switzerland;
its far from even being relevant to most of continental Europe. It doesn't
describe music of the Celtic countries & pre-European-influence England
well at all.
Gruning said:
#>In the West, a meta-language has developed over the last
#>thousand years or so in order to describe pitch relationships, harmonic
#>movement, rhythmic relationships etc. Many other music traditions have
#>their own terminology to describe these same musical phenomenon.
I say:
So why not use the language the tradition has already developed, instead
of imposing your language own on it?
Gruning said:
#>If we're
#>talking about music and using the English language we're pretty well stuck
#>with discussing it in terms which are recognized as representing various
#>aspects of these pitch relationships etc.
I say:
The ones in use are very imprecise.
Gruning said:
#>Would you prefer that we speak in terms of "cents"
#>or "hertz?" If so...that's not a problem. Frankly, I'm not too sure what
#>you're trying to say in the above statement. Could you be more specific?
I say:
As far as I understand it "cents" doesn't tell you too much unless you know the
size of the interval you're dividing that way. I'd prefer you stuck to
frequencies & ratios of frequencies.
I had said:
+>: +>: They will have to adopt a scientifically precise, culture-free language of
+>: +>: description before they convince me they're free of European classical taint.
Gruning had said:
#>: ->Actually...30 years is more like it. The phrase "sciencing about music"
#>: ->was coined first (I believe) by Alan Merriam in "The Anthropology of
#>: ->Music" which was published in 1964.
Then I had said:
+>: Then why is everyone still referring to modal music in terminology
+>: devloped for European classical music?
So Gruning said:
#>Prior to the seventeenth century European "classical" music *was* modal.
I say:
You're ducking the answer to "why don't musicologists use precise
scientific terminolgy instead of attitude-laden terms like "sharp" & "flat".
Gruning said:
#>The music/analytical lexicon was already reasonably well developed at that
#>point.
I say:
And the same *lexicon* is being used today, but to describe different
*phenomena*, which is unnecessarily confusing.
Arcadiamax
In article <3448d764...@snews2.zippo.com>, abby...@orlinter.com
(Abby Sale) writes:
>Rural Scotland was long a literate society - fully aware of Biblical &
>classical literature and with excellent, if occasional, access to written
>sources as well as to urban society and lifestyle.
Rural English speaking Scotland, perhaps? As far as I am aware a sizeable
part of 18th Century Scotland in the West Highlands and Hebrides spoke no
English at all.
>The great majority in
>the village may have been illiterate, but that's different. They always
>had access to a scribe or a reader.
Again, was this so in Gaelic speaking verbal tradition areas, and even if
it was would the scribe or reader would have communicated in English?
>This is not a pickey distinction - as
>I say, it's a pet one. It goes to the very essence of a "folk society" at
>any location or historical era.
I'm not too clear on this - are you saying that literacy is fundamental to
a 'folk society' ?
My own definition of "folk music," by the
>way (And I'm just going to come right out and say it...) is simply and
>specifically "The musical culture of a folk society." It's _that_ nature,
>not the song's that drives the nature of the whole.
Please explain the last sentence?
Regards, Max
Abby Sale
On 13 Oct 1997 18:45:59 GMT, kes...@alum.mit.edu@ (Joe Kesselman, yclept
Keshlam) wrote:
>Having said all that: 99% of the time you can ignore all of these lexical
>markings and the sentences will mean the same thing. And 99% of the
>time that you think you might want to use 'em, you should probably instead
>take time to calm down before writing.
All well put except watch out giving me advice, Bubba! Maybe I just don't
_feel_ like calming that far down. Maybe I just _want_ to emphesize
things. What about THAT?
Actually, and strictly not that it matters, I take *x* to just be
old-fashioned for _x_. From the old days when pretty much only academics
& govenment had access to internet. It was _always_ the emphesis of
choice on FIDOnet and may well have come over from there. There is some
slight logic to it.
But more importantly,
>Nov. 8 at Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse:THE WOMEN OF THE CALIBASH.
I never heard of these people. Have they any relationship to Jimmy
Durante? Or are they just gourdy? Either is Good.
Joe Kesselman, yclept Keshlam
In <34441d49...@snews2.zippo.com>, abby...@orlinter.com (Abby Sale) writes:
>All well put except watch out giving me advice, Bubba! Maybe I just don't
>_feel_ like calming that far down. Maybe I just _want_ to emphesize
>things. What about THAT?
In my experience, heated argument drives out enlightening conversation,
and the latter's a lot more pleasant and useful for everyone in the long
run. If you don't like the advice, ignore it... but I've seen too many folks
write a note in the heat of their first reaction which they've later regretted
because it escalated a simple disagreement or misunderstanding into a
flamewar.
Your milage may vary. Void where prohibited by law.
>>Nov. 8 at Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse:THE WOMEN OF THE CALIBASH.
>I never heard of these people. Have they any relationship to Jimmy
>Durante? Or are they just gourdy?
The latter, though perhaps not in the intended sense. They do a lot of
traditional African and African-inspired songs, particularly featuring
percussion instruments made from large gourds; hence the name. Good
performers; I'm looking forward to this show. (It's our tenth season,
and a remarkably good lineup -- my webpage is badly out of date but it
does have the rest of the schedule.)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
Joseph J. Kesselman http://pages.prodigy.com/keshlam/
Nov. 8 at Walkabout Clearwater Coffeehouse:THE WOMEN OF THE CALIBASH.
Jack Campin
j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>> j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>>> If all these pipers & fiddlers *were* using wildly differing idiosyncratic
>>> scales (& I trust you will dig up the ratios to prove it if they were
>>> recorded),
>> No - go read Collinson, you might learn something.
> You know a library around here that carries him?
Since his large book is the standard ethnomusicological treatise on the
bagpipe, it has got to be available at some music library in Boston.
> Meanwhile, can you point out what Cape Breton fiddlers MacNeill thinks
> are in tunings wildly different from each other?
He wasn't talking about them. I was - from what I've learnt from Kenny
Fraser, who has spent quite a while there learning the local fiddle style,
and from listening to a few CB fiddlers live. I don't think I've ever heard
a recording of CB fiddle music.
> The old-time fiddlers & pipers (mostly Irish Uillean pipers are
> what I have historical recordings of) & especially singers (because
> singers are what I've heard the most of) I've heard seem grouped around
> 3 styles, one more Irish-sounding, one more Scottish-sounding, one more
> British-sounding
The problem with that being that the scale pitches for voice, fiddle and
pipes in Scotland are very disparate. Nobody anywhere sings or plays the
fiddle in anything close to the bagpipe scale - when I mentioned Cape Breton
fiddlers imitating the pipe scale, I didn't mean they *exactly* imitated
it. Just bent a few notes here and there to convey a general impression.
ghost
In article <29...@purr.demon.co.uk> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>
>j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>> ja...@purr.demon.co.uk (Jack Campin) writes:
>>> j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>The problem with that being that the scale pitches for voice, fiddle and
>pipes in Scotland are very disparate. Nobody anywhere sings or plays the
>fiddle in anything close to the bagpipe scale - when I mentioned Cape Breton
>fiddlers imitating the pipe scale, I didn't mean they *exactly* imitated
>it. Just bent a few notes here and there to convey a general impression.
And the problem with *that* is that you haven't been listening to the
singers *I've* been listening to over here. The older generations, & people
intent on adhering to the styles of the older generations, are a lot less
influenced by modern tuning than the traditionalist-revival types from
Scotland & Ireland whose records I've been buying & concerts I've been
going to. There are people here who I take to be of Scottish descent (a great
oversimplification, I'm sure, but a lot of them have Scottish names on all
sides of their families, & look like faces I've seen from Scotland) that
I've heard use singing-scales that resemble bagpipe scales. Ditto for
people who I think have a large Irish input to their families; *they* seem
to be using singing-scales (& ornaments) I've heard used in Uillean piping
& sean-nos singing.
Jeri Corlew
So it's a genetic thing... ;-)
I would imagine that if you've grown up hearing a certain type of scale,
it's very difficult (if not impossible) to hear music in another type
without flinching. You can learn the theory, but it still *sounds* wrong.
I don't think choice plays very much of a role in the scales that folk
performers without a great deal of institutional music education use - it's
more instinctive.
Thanks for the thread - I'm learning a lot!
Jeri
Anti-Spam Alert
Please replace "nonet" with "inet" in my address when replying.
ghost
In article <62gjii$7...@necco.harvard.edu> j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) writes:
>*I* think of the piano in a Maritime (though I haven't narrowed it
>specifically down enough to seperate out the Cape Bretoners) traditional
>band as primarily accompaniment.
I meant to say "as primarily percussion". I *really* don't like to hear
European-classical-chordal stuff done as accompaniment to
Maritime traditional music, but you can get going some pretty neat
counter-rhythms going without getting in the way of the primary rhythm
(which, in dance music, its important not to obscure).
ghost
In article <34490781...@news.inet.att.co.kr> jer...@nonet.att.co.kr writes:
>On 17 Oct 1997 05:26:14 GMT, j...@endor.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>I would imagine that if you've grown up hearing a certain type of scale,
>it's very difficult (if not impossible) to hear music in another type
>without flinching. You can learn the theory, but it still *sounds* wrong.
Its possible for me to hear a lot of different scales & like, even love
them, rather than flinch when I hear them, & I suspect that this reaction
is true for a lot of people besides myself. What makes them acceptable
is that these "alien scales" *are* harmonic, they're just using different
families of harmonic waves. What's difficult, though, is learning to use
an "alien scale" yourself. Inevitably you turn the alien scale into its
closest equivalent in the musical system you've internalized. I think the
process is similar to trying to internalize the grammer for a language with
sufficiently alien grammer to the language(s) you speak; inevitably you
start making constructions that are right for your home language(s) but
wrong for the new one, or mix the 2 languages together in a way that is
comprehensible only to people who understand all the ingredients in the mix.
I think what has happened to seperate fiddle & piping scales (& styles, to
a lesser extent) from singing scales represents the tyranny of a system
that says "alien scales *must* be abandoned". Its easier to attack
vocal music 1st, because people are very self-conscious about speaking,
& singing is an extension of singing, in a manner which other people will
criticize. They tend to leave the fiddle & pipe scales in "the old tuning"
for longer than they leave singing, because the remnants of the old tuning
(& ornamentation style) are more easily catagorized as interesting
idiosyncracies of the player than hold-over singing scales (& styles) are,
but eventually the fiddle & pipe scales come around to the new, preached as
"only right way" of tuning. The desire to play in concert with other musicians
already adherent the new system speeds this process.
I've always read that fiddle music is supposed to be the closest
instrumental music to the human voice (though I'd vote for Uillean piping
as equally expressively human). Its strange that something designed to
emulate the voice can remain, for a while, in a system that the voice has
abandoned due to some outside pressure.
ghost
>And in a less extreme way, the Cape Breton
>fiddlers I mentioned with their customary piano accompanists.
The general thought about people who study *Irish* music is that
the great early-20th century Sligo fiddler Michael Coleman either ignored
the pianists foisted upon him as accompaniment (the record companies were
trying to sell dance records, so thought there should be a piano where
traditionally there was none), or that he accepted them as
percussive accompaniests & ignored the tones they were producing.
(One of these universally-derided accompaniests was supposed to have been
a friend of Coleman's, so they *all* couldn't have been foisted upon him;
or maybe he made them hire his friend so his friend would have the job
that was going to be going to *someone*.)
Couldn't the same be true of these Cape Breton fiddlers you cite?
Arcadiamax
In article <62girb$7...@necco.harvard.edu>, j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost )
writes:
>
>I've always read that fiddle music is supposed to be the closest
>instrumental music to the human voice (though I'd vote for Uillean piping
>as equally expressively human). Its strange that something designed to
>emulate the voice can remain, for a while, in a system that the voice has
>abandoned due to some outside pressure.
1)The violin designed to emulate the voice? Evidence please about violin
design from the makers point of view (after all, they designed the instrument)?
2) What 'system that the voice has abandoned'? Is there any evidence that
fiddle players at any time consistently adhered to any particular scale
other than the one everyone tended to play in their area? For many folk
musicians, identifying a scale must have been like telling the time - there
was a standard in your area but no means of comparing it with anything
else. Until keyboards and free reed instruments appeared in 19th Century
(in anything but great houses in the country and those of the urban
'middle' class when it appeared) there wasn't much to compare your scale
with. If you lived in Skye and the only other instruments you regularly
heard were pipes, it's a fair bet you played from a similar scale.
The great Scottish fiddle players/composers, however have all left us
tunes which indicate that not only did they play from pretty close to a
'standard' modern scale, they actually favoured it - try playing William
Marshall or Neil Gow compositions from a 'natural 'scale and see if it
makes any sense.
When Buddy McMaster from Cape Breton plays the note now called a C
'supernatural' he does it very intentionally for that specific place in
that tune - it may not happen every time a C comes up in that tune, but
every time he returns to the same place there it is, and the pitch is the
same every time. This is not playing off a different scale at all, but
choosing to pitch one note differently to normal for a specific effect,
just like playing an accidental.
3) I think this discussion is chasing its tail, and is kind of futile for
several reasons:
a) Folk music, like anything else, progresses. The modern scale is much
more likely to have been adopted because musicians heard what were then new
tunes played in that scale, thought 'Christ, that sounds good' and changed
to it.
b) Underlying the many statements in this thread like
>
'Its strange that something designed to
>emulate the voice can remain, for a while, in a system that the voice has
>abandoned due to some outside pressure.
there appears to be one of those mistakenly romantic views of folk music
and folk culture which confuses progress willingly adopted with some kind
of imposition - it also comes out in previous statements about 'British
standardisation of the pipe scale'. Who standardised it? Scottish Pipe
Majors, that's who. Why? Because it seems like a good idea when you play
with other pipe bands.
Meanwhile back at the noteface, musicologists at some distance from the
living reality (not Jack Campin) look for some conspiracy wherby poor
starving but honest folk musicians in the misty Celtic glens of antiquity
are searched out and cast into the howling winds of progress by The Note
Police armed with pitch pipes, never to see the Ould Country again, for the
crime of Playing The True Old Scales, probably by The Perfidious British
(by the way, does this include The Scots or not?).
What nonsense - folk music is a practical art, and the styles of playing
now extant exist simply because folk musicians have over the years adopted
them because they like them. Musicologists have to describe it in the only
terms they can, which are classical musical theory never designed to
describe folk music - but then, folk music isn't there to be described,
it's just there to be played...
Regards, Max (Scottish fiddle player)
Jeri Corlew
On 20 Oct 1997 21:35:39 GMT, j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>In article <34490781...@news.inet.att.co.kr> jer...@nonet.att.co.kr writes:
>>On 17 Oct 1997 05:26:14 GMT, j...@endor.harvard.edu ( ghost ) wrote:
>
>>I would imagine that if you've grown up hearing a certain type of scale,
>>it's very difficult (if not impossible) to hear music in another type
>>without flinching. You can learn the theory, but it still *sounds* wrong.
<snip>
> What's difficult, though, is learning to use
>an "alien scale" yourself. Inevitably you turn the alien scale into its
>closest equivalent in the musical system you've internalized. I think the
>process is similar to trying to internalize the grammer for a language with
>sufficiently alien grammer to the language(s) you speak; inevitably you
>start making constructions that are right for your home language(s) but
>wrong for the new one, or mix the 2 languages together in a way that is
>comprehensible only to people who understand all the ingredients in the mix.
I was thinking that musical "language" was much like verbal language.
People who grow up hearing and using more than one, as Jack pointed out
Scots do, have a much easier time understanding those and subsequently
learned ones. Once a person hits adulthood, the appreciation of differing
scales takes a lot more effort if they've only known one system up until
then.
OK, not impossible, but it takes work that a lot of people probably don't
want to do.
>I think what has happened to seperate fiddle & piping scales (& styles, to
>a lesser extent) from singing scales represents the tyranny of a system
>that says "alien scales *must* be abandoned". Its easier to attack
>vocal music 1st, because people are very self-conscious about speaking,
>& singing is an extension of singing, in a manner which other people will
>criticize. They tend to leave the fiddle & pipe scales in "the old tuning"
>for longer than they leave singing, because the remnants of the old tuning
>(& ornamentation style) are more easily catagorized as interesting
>idiosyncracies of the player than hold-over singing scales (& styles) are,
>but eventually the fiddle & pipe scales come around to the new, preached as
>"only right way" of tuning. The desire to play in concert with other musicians
>already adherent the new system speeds this process.
Maybe because singing (at least when I was a kid) was taught on a minor
scale (sorry) to *everyone* in school, and it was a group activity.
Classical instruments were taught, so classical-type tunings were all most
people got exposed to. I never even heard the word "modal" until I was 17.
Was this peculiar to my school/area/country?
The only way most people in the US get to learn other-than-classical stuff
is if they're exposed outside of school. Well, it *used* to be that way,
but I suspect things have changed.
>I've always read that fiddle music is supposed to be the closest
>instrumental music to the human voice (though I'd vote for Uillean piping
>as equally expressively human). Its strange that something designed to
>emulate the voice can remain, for a while, in a system that the voice has
>abandoned due to some outside pressure.
Most folk instruments such as fiddles and pipes are learned from listening
to fiddlers and pipers, thereby carrying on that system. People have to
go straight to the source to learn folk music forms, but other instruments
and voice are taught in institutions. There are loads of fiddle tutors out
there, but when's the last time you've heard of an ballad-singing style
vocal coach?
ghost
>In article <62girb$7...@necco.harvard.edu>, j...@deas.harvard.edu ( ghost )
>writes:
>>I've always read that fiddle music is supposed to be the closest
>>instrumental music to the human voice (though I'd vote for Uillean piping
>>as equally expressively human). Its strange that something designed to
>>emulate the voice can remain, for a while, in a system that the voice has
>>abandoned due to some outside pressure.
>1)The violin designed to emulate the voice? Evidence please about violin
>design from the makers point of view (after all, they designed the instrument)?
I was talking about playing the thing so that you sound almost like a
person singing. That's an idea a lot of instrumentalists have.
And as you probably already know, if you'd but think about it, the
modern fiddle evolved from earlier similar stringed instruments, it wasn't
designed on a drawing board, like, say, the saxophone (I've read about
the one-string African fiddle being an early ancestor, but you could
probably have looked anywhere in the world where there were archers
& found them in their spare time scraping something, probably an arrow,
across the string of the bow. And the saxophone of course owes a bunch
to earlier brass & woodwind instruments, both reed & non-reed blown,
which went into *its* drawing-board engineering).
>2) What 'system that the voice has abandoned'? Is there any evidence that
>fiddle players at any time consistently adhered to any particular scale
>other than the one everyone tended to play in their area?
No there isn't. You're saying exactly what *I'm* saying here; that in
a particular geographic & ethnic region, people tend to adhere to a
particular scale that may not be used beyond that region. Why would they
have one scale for instruments, & another for voices? I'm not saying that
they couldn't have more than one scale, but that is seems an unnecessarily
complicated system to maintain unless there's some religious/ritualistic
reason for maintaining it.
>For many folk
>musicians, identifying a scale must have been like telling the time - there
>was a standard in your area but no means of comparing it with anything
>else. Until keyboards and free reed instruments appeared in 19th Century
>(in anything but great houses in the country and those of the urban
>'middle' class when it appeared) there wasn't much to compare your scale
>with. If you lived in Skye and the only other instruments you regularly
>heard were pipes, it's a fair bet you played from a similar scale.
Exactly true. I'll bet you *sang* on a similar scale too, because you had
tuned the pipes in the 1st place to emulate singing. The singing voice
is the 1st instrument.
>The great Scottish fiddle players/composers, however have all left us
>tunes which indicate that not only did they play from pretty close to a
>'standard' modern scale, they actually favoured it - try playing William
>Marshall or Neil Gow compositions from a 'natural 'scale and see if it
>makes any sense.
The abandoned scales *are* close to the one we wound up with, that's why
the music on them sounds similar to the music we wound up with, & not, say,
like Indonesian music instead.
Is it Neil Gow, Scott Skinner, or both who's (who're) always held up as
a Scottish traditional-style composer so heavily influenced by the
classical music of his (their) day that you really can't count on him (them)
for leaving you tunes that reflect what people without those influences
were playing?
>When Buddy McMaster from Cape Breton plays the note now called a C
>'supernatural' he does it very intentionally for that specific place in
>that tune - it may not happen every time a C comes up in that tune, but
>every time he returns to the same place there it is, and the pitch is the
>same every time. This is not playing off a different scale at all, but
>choosing to pitch one note differently to normal for a specific effect,
>just like playing an accidental.
Does he use this note only in that one tune, or can you consistantly find
other tunes where he, & other Cape Breton fiddlers, use that note.
>3) I think this discussion is chasing its tail, and is kind of futile for
>several reasons:
>a) Folk music, like anything else, progresses. The modern scale is much
>more likely to have been adopted because musicians heard what were then new
>tunes played in that scale, thought 'Christ, that sounds good' and changed
>to it.
Exactly. You use the new scale to play/sing the new tunes, & you keep the
old scale to play/sing the old tunes. For a while. But eventually everything
gets translated into the new scale so you don't have to maintain two scales
in your head, & because you don't want to be thought of as old-fashioned.
>b) Underlying the many statements in this thread like
>'Its strange that something designed to
>>emulate the voice can remain, for a while, in a system that the voice has
>>abandoned due to some outside pressure.
>there appears to be one of those mistakenly romantic views of folk music
>and folk culture which confuses progress willingly adopted with some kind
>of imposition - it also comes out in previous statements about 'British
>standardisation of the pipe scale'. Who standardised it? Scottish Pipe
>Majors, that's who. Why? Because it seems like a good idea when you play
>with other pipe bands.
Why were there Scottish Pipe Bands? So the British marching regiments
could have fashionable-in-its-day musical accompaniment. If you were a
piper you didn't have to be a gunner or a bayonetter, I don't think.
Very good reason to take up the pipes, standardized, modernized tuning & all.
There *is* a lot of musical imposition from the European classical culture:
Find me *one* publically-financed school in my country or yours
where they teach singing of traditional music according to traditional scales &
singing styles, & not classical music according to classical scales & styles.
>Meanwhile back at the noteface, musicologists at some distance from the
>living reality (not Jack Campin) look for some conspiracy wherby poor
>starving but honest folk musicians in the misty Celtic glens of antiquity
>are searched out and cast into the howling winds of progress by The Note
>Police armed with pitch pipes, never to see the Ould Country again, for the
>crime of Playing The True Old Scales, probably by The Perfidious British
>(by the way, does this include The Scots or not?).
They *are* cast out though; I've read article after article over on bgrass-l
trying to explain why Bill Monroe & Hazel Dickens sound so good, even though
the European-classically trained article-writers trying to do the
explaining hold onto the notion that Monroe, Dickens & other
old-style singers are "singing the wrong notes, & singing the notes wrong".
>What nonsense - folk music is a practical art, and the styles of playing
>now extant exist simply because folk musicians have over the years adopted
>them because they like them.
They've also adopted standardized & modern styles & scales because the
mass-produced instruments that are suddenly available are designed
to accomodate them.
>Musicologists have to describe it in the only
>terms they can, which are classical musical theory never designed to
>describe folk music - but then, folk music isn't there to be described,
>it's just there to be played...
If you are going to describe it, & people are, there is no justification
using a system to describe it that was designed to describe something
completely different.
Timothy Jaques
Traditionally in Cape Breton the fiddle and the pipes were accompanied by
step-dancing to beat out the time. I quote Hamish Moore on the subject,
from the liner of his "Dannsa' Air An Drochaid" (Greentrax CDTRAX 073),
recorded in Cape Breton:
"Another factor which makes Cape Breton music so distinctive today is the
unique piano style. Before pianos were introduced to Cape Breton the
accompaniment to the music was the rhythm of the stepping feet. The Cape
Breton style of piano playing has develped directly from the rhythm of th
steps and has evolved into a sophisticated chordal and rhythmic
accompaniment. A typical dance in Cape Breton will have one fiddler and
one pianist providing the music."
As he goes on to say, they still step-dance to the music -- not just the
audience but the fiddlers themselves. (Ex. Natalie MacMaster and Ashley
MacIsaac do so in concert.) A lot of the stuff recorded in the studios
doesn't really reflect how it sounds or is played at an informal dance.
And the fiddlers often keep time with their feet while sitting.
I don't think this dancing-as-accompaniment-or-keeping-time was or is
unique to Cape Breton music, as the old-time southern US fiddlers used to
do the same, and often sang lyrics to the jigs etc. (as they do in
Newfoundland as well). It was, after all, dance music for the fun of it,
not something to be listened to and scutinized as closely as we seem to do
these days.
Timothy Jaques tja...@netcom.ca
Windsor, Ontario, Canada
"Common sense is that set of prejudices we attain by the age of eighteen."
ghost <j...@deas.harvard.edu> wrote in article
<62gjii$7...@necco.harvard.edu>...