Our last tune of the term – McKinnon’s Lament. I found it in Michael Raven’s English Country Dance Tunes book, which was first published in 1984, but I’ve not unearthed anything else about it. We varied the dotted crotchets by splitting some of them into crotchet-quaver.
Here are the dots:
Here is the PDF:
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:
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:
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:
Here’s a fantastic polka from Ireland, first published in 1858. It has many, many titles, including The Grand Old Woman, The Half Door, Lisdoonvarna Polka, London Bridge Polka and Leather The Bottle. A wattle is a stick or truncheon.
Here is a video with a slower and a faster run through:
Here are the dots:
And finally a PDF to download:
Here we have one of my favourite schottisches, which I know as Texas Schottische – it’s not the more famous The Texas Schottische, which is a quite different tune, so I have decided to tweak the title to A Texas Schottische to avoid confusion. A Schottische is a kind of slow polka originating in Bohemia and becoming popular in the Victorian era.
I know this tune from playing for one particular (now defunct) ceilidh band however, I can’t find this tune anywhere else, under this or any other title! I suspect that the title may have been assigned incorrectly, that perhaps it was in a set with the more famous Texas Shottische but a search of Apple Music, Google Play, Spotify etc hasn’t shed any light on the issue, and searches in the Vaughn Williams Library, on Folktunefinder.com and on various other online resources have proved fruitless.
It’s still a cracking tune, and I hope you enjoy it. Here is a video play through:
And here are the dots, with suggested bowing for the fiddle players since the long-short-long-short pattern can cause difficulties. We added single cuts below the first B in bar one of the A section (demonstrated in the video), you might also try adding a single cut above the top Gs in the B section.
Here is a PDF:
This beautiful Scottish tune is somewhat of a curiosity – I first knew this tune from the Robin Williamson Fiddle Tunes book, pretty much as it’s written here, however this version appears to be a rewritten version of an jig by Pipe Major Alexander McKellar (1824-1895). Our version doesn’t show up in any tune books until the 1970s, and it’s not clear who is responsible for this rewriting! The title is also interesting: Williamson suggests that it refers to the English defeat of the Jacobite forces in the mid 1700s – it may be true that it does refer to this time but the tune is certainly not that old.
This tune works well as a march, or slower as an air.
We experimented with adding turns in places where the tune moves by step, and double cuts on the stronger beats of the bar (beat one and beat three).
Here is a video of a slow version (missing a B part I think, apologies!) and a faster version:
Here are the dots:
I am currently unable to send out my usual email about website posts, or to reply to emails due to problems with my email server. This will hopefully be sorted in the next day or so, but apologies in the meantime!
Major Malley’s Reel, aka Major Molle’s, is a Scottish tune by Andrew Gow first published in 1809 shortly after Gow’s death. Molle was an officer in the British army. The tune has since traveled to Canada and England, and we know it was still in use in the 1800s in England, as Thomas Hardy referenced the tune in his 1874 novel Far From the Madding Crowd.
Variations covered in class include adding turns to notes that are part of descending scales, and rhythmic variations in the B section.
Here is an example of how you might apply these ideas:
The ideas used here are the same or similar to those used in Rattle in Cash. This is mostly because the tunes were chosen for their similar melodic shapes, so that they would be good companions – note the removed notes in bar 13 to mirror the same rhythmic feature in Rattle the Cash.
A ‘fidget’ is a note added in between repeated notes, either a step above/below the repeated notes, or a third above/below (a ‘skip’). The scale is a connecting note added in between notes that are a skip (or a third) apart. I’ve written an example below to demonstrate how these might be applied to this tune, averaging one variation per two bar phrase, but try out these ideas in other places to find what works for you.
