Here is the B section of last week’s tune Gille-Callum, with further ideas on how to practise these rhythms:
Here’s a video of the B section and some practise methods:
Here a video of the whole tune played slowly:
Finally a PDF of the whole tune and chords:
and as a little extra, here’s the E5 chord for the ukulele players!
Finally, I’ve done a simplified version of the tune here, essentially removing a few (but not all of) of the trickier rhythms, for anyone who would like it:
Here is the A part of Monday 17th’s tune, Gille-Callum, aka Gillie Callum, The Cutty Spoon or The Lad Malcolm amongst other names. It’s a Scottish strathspey that dates back to the mid-1700s, a strathspey being a slow dance in 4/4, with the tune named for the dance form and normally containing characteristic Scottish ‘snap’rhythms. This is quite a challenging tune type, so give yourself time to get used to the rhythms and the techniques for producing them.
Here are the dots, with a notation of how we divided the rhythm in order to learn it:
Here is a demo of the A section with a suggestion of how to practise this rhythm:
Here is a video for the fiddle players on how to achieve the Scottish ‘snap’ rhythms, with some bow exercises to help:
PDF of the chords (a PDF of the full tune will follow when we’ve learned the whole thing):
Here is Monday 10th’s tune, The High Road to Linton. This tune is in Scottish, Irish, north eastern English and Canadian traditions, and was first published in 1794. It’s also known as Cuddle in a Boasie, Leinster High Road and Quadrille du Bucherons as well as various other titles including the word Linton, such as Jenny’s Gone to Linton.
There are various towns and villages across the British Isles called Linton – given the areas in which the tune was collected and published, I’m going to guess that the Linton in question is either the one near Morpeth or the one near Jedburgh, either way around the Scottish/English border.
It has four parts, of which we’ve learned three so far – I have included all four parts here but don’t feel obliged to learn the fourth part, we will cover it next week! Here is a video with the single cuts and double cuts, and the rhythmic emphasis we discussed. There is a PDF beneath with some examples of bowing available too.
Here are the dots:
Our last tune of the year, Jock’s Bear Dance, with an added harmony and rhythmic accompaniment. The purpose of the accompaniment is drive the tune, making it feel lively even though it’s not that fast. Here are the dots (with apologies to the whistle players for the low notes! The video below shows a couple of ways the tune, harmony and rhythmic accompaniment can be played to make an arrangement.
We’re finished for this term now, I hope everyone has a great Christmas and New Year. We’ll return on January 10th – whether this is in person or online remains to be seen, we’ll see what the regulations and recommendations are in the new year.
Here is another French tune that I know as Jock’s Bear Dance, having learned it from fiddler Jock Tyldesley. It also comes up as ‘Branle de Bourgogne’, a branle being a type of dance that dates back to 16th century France. Again, we added turns in places where the melody moves by step or in skips.
Here is Monday 29th November’s tune, La Roulante, by French musician Jean Blanchard. It’s in mixolydian mode, so a major mode with a flattened seventh, in this case D major with C naturals, and has a lovely syncopated feel in the B music. We tried adding turns in places where the melody moves by step or in skips.
Here are the dots, with a PDF and video underneath:
I think that learning by ear and remembering the tune go hand in hand – that’s not to say you can’t remember a tune that you’ve learned from the written music, but rather that learning a tune by ear gives you a head start. Here’s why:
When we learn by ear, we are learning in a way that always us to internalise the tune – we’re not reading or relying on an external source but rather the whole thing is in our heads, at least for a bit, which is to say it’s in our short-term memory. Internalising the tune is step one in remembering it in the longer term.
From there we need to reinforce and repeat the tune over time to help to move it from our short-term to our long-term memory. If you dive for the sheet music as soon as it’s available, then you are letting go of that internalisation and you are far less likely to remember it in the longer term. Don’t be afraid to forget the tune. Seriously. You probably won’t forget all of it but if you do then you are much better off relearning it from the video or from an audio source – the second time of learning will be much quicker than the first time, the third time will be even quicker again as you strengthen the neural pathways in the brain.
By all means refer to the music if you need to check a note or to remind yourself of what note the B section starts on but try to avoid cleaving to the dots for fear of forgetting, as you need to partially forget and relearn a tune several times before it’s fully internalised and in your long-term memory. Building this kind of recall is a process and if a tune isn’t all there, that just means that you’re not done yet.
Experimenting with the ornamentation and variations that we cover in class is a great way work on tune recall as it demands that you repeat and reinforce the tune many times in a creative and proactive way that really gets you inside the tune and understanding it (internalisation), also allowing you to develop your own way of playing.
Another benefit of relying on audio sources rather than written music is that you will start to hear the rhythmic and stylistic nuances of the music that simply can’t be expressed effectively in written music. I often throw in extra elements for the more experienced players to try – the more you listen the more you will hear. I’m generally unable to create website posts until later in the week, so making your own recordings at key points in class is encouraged!
Folk music by its nature consists of communal ownership of material (a shared repertoire of traditional tunes) and personal agency (individual expression and interpretation). I try to design exercises and tasks to empower people in both aspects of the genre, but this does demand a proactive, independent approach. I hope this post makes all of this a bit clearer!
Here is the tune from November 15th, another Irish tune to go in a set with Lilting Banshee. Look for the fidget shapes to add rolls (highlighted example in blue), and for the crotchet-quaver rhythm moving by step (highlighted in red) for adding turns. Some of the turns work better on the fiddle and others work better on wind instruments – try the notated version in the PDF and see which ones work for you.
Here are the dots:
Here is a PDF with some more ornaments written in:
Here is the tune from November 8th, The Lilting Banshee. This is an Irish tune, with a few places to put our specific ornaments in: look for the ‘fidget’ shapes (example highlighted in blue) to add a roll, and for repeated notes in between main beats (example highlighted in red) for single cuts. These are fully notated in the PDF version.
Here’s the video demonstrating the tune:
Over the last couple of weeks we’ve also looked at ornamentation and variation elements. The idea here is to look at the broader picture of where these are generally used in order to empower players to use them independently in their playing, rather than giving you a strict model to copy that isn’t as easily disseminated.
Here is a short video that explains these things, with examples:
New Ealing Sessions 