Month: July 2021

Stewart’s Rant

Here’s a Scottish dance tune, also known as General Stuart’s Reel and The New Way of Gildon. It dates back to at least 1749 when it was published in the Menzies Manuscript.

Here is a video of a slower and faster rendition of the tune, with some rhythmic variations in the B section:

Here are the PDFs of the music and the two sets of chords that we used:

stewarts-rantDownload
stewards-rant-chordsDownload

Old Joe

Here is a polka that works nicely as a partner to Leather Away the Wattle. I know it from Dave Townsend’s English Dance Tune books though to me, the A part feels possibly Irish and the B part more English. As I suspected they might, efforts to find out more about this tune have proved fruitless. I’ve looked for both the title and the melodic shapes and while it bears similarities to other tunes, there’s nothing there to give any real leads on the mystery.

We played a little with the rhythms in the B part, and added turns and/or triplets in places where the melody moves by step.

Here is a video with a slower and faster version of the tune:

Here are the dots with a PDF below:

old-joeDownload

Winter’s Night Schottische

Here is a tune that goes by many titles: Rainbow Schottische, Stephen Baldwin’s Schottische and Midnight Schottische. It appears in Kerr’s Merry Melodies book of 1870 and appears to have remained popular ever since in England, Scotland, Ireland and North America.

We added some turns and/ore triplets in places where the melody moves by step but otherwise kept ornamentation and variation to a minimum.

Here is a video with slower and faster versions of the tune:

Here are the dots, with a PDF below:

wnsDownload