Author: debfiddle

Deborah is a violinist and violist specialising in English folk music. She trained in viola and Baroque viola at Birmingham Conservatoire, before returning to her first love of traditional music, song and dance. Deborah has developed a passion for playing for dancing since joining her first ceilidh band at age 13. She is a member of Stepling, a band performing English music, step-dance, song and percussion, and also plays with Folk Dance Remixed, a dance company combining traditional dance with hip hop and street dance styles, with whom she has performed as such events as Car Fest, the Southbank's Festival of Love and Glasgow's Commonwealth Games Festival. Deborah records on a regular basis for a number of people, including The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra, and for Laurel Swift's 'Travelling with Thomas' musical. She teaches music, song and dance regularly for The English Folk Dance and Song Society, as well as on a freelance basis for various workshop series, festivals and music services. Deborah recently completed The Teaching Musician MA degree course at Trinity Laban, graduating with Distinction.

Johnny’s Gone To France

Here are the dots and video for Johnny’s Gone to France. There was some discussion over the origins of this tune on Monday as I, and many others, felt that that it sound pretty Irish! Further research shows that this tune is in The Fiddler’s Tune Book Vol. 2 by Peter Kennedy (1954), which covers tunes from all over the British Isles, it’s listed as on TuneArch.org as an English reel, and it’s also in Michael Raven’s English Country Dance Tunes book (1984). However! The version in the Raven book is slightly different to the version I know specifically at the end – I play both on the video – which makes it sound a lot less Irish. This makes me think that it is an English reel after all, of the type similar to tunes such as Wednesday Night, Dear Tobacco and Cuckold Come Out the Amery. I find the alternative titles/related tunes that have been suggested on various sites to be rather tenuous at best, so this is what we’re going with!

Johnny’s Gone to FranceDownload

For those of you that are interested, here is the Michael Raven’s version:

Fete de Village

Fete de Village is a country dance tune that’s been in the English tradition for well over 200 years, but it started life as music from a stage production of the same name by French composer Gossec. This production came to England in the 1780s, after which time this tune can be found in various English tune collections such as those of William Mittel and Thomas Hammersley as well as in the infamous 1785 ‘A Selection of Scotch, English, Irish and Foreign Airs’ by Aird (vol. II). Source: Trad Tune Archive

I’ve included a version of the tune by Bellowhead below, partially because it’s brilliant but also because it’s too late in the evening for me to record a video, I will remedy this tomorrow! *EDIT – there is now a video of the tune played at a medium speed below the Bellowhead video*

Here are the dots and downloads:

Fete de VillageDownload

We played with the arpeggio patterns in the B section, building these up gradually and trying different inversions to create an automatic harmony. Brush up on your D and G major arpeggios, there will be more on this next week!

Tobin’s Jig and Hardiman’s Fancy

NB. Hardiman’s now has updated chords.

When playing Tobin’s Jig last week, we initially struggled to give the tune a sense of lift, lilt or dance – our solutions were:

  • Have the long line of each four-bar phrase our heads before we started, with it’s peaks and troughs. This got us away from focussing too much on the individual notes and patterns, and from the mechanics of playing this tune on our respective instruments.
  • Add some subtle dynamics – we followed the rise of the melody with a small crescendo (gradual increase in volume) and the fall of the melody with a diminuendo (gradual decrease in volume). Subtle is the operative word here! It isn’t always the case that we need to rise and fall with the melody, this can become a little obvious and predictable, but the idea is that we’re giving an additional dimension, or melodic shaping, to the tune.
  • Add some slurs over the bar lines (this is updated on the original post) – this can give the sense of moving forward across the bar line, with some very subtle syncopation in the phrasing.

Tobin’s Jig

A tune to potentially go with Hardiman’s Fancy, Irish jig Tobin’s Fancy. This has similar double-jig rhythms to Hardiman’s, with a similarly wide range of notes. At the time of choosing, I didn’t know what key Hardiman’s had been learned in, so D major was a good option for the various keys that this tune tends to be played in – we’ll find out later if that works!

24/6/24 edit: I have updated the tune with some slurs across the bar lines, to give the tune a sense of flow and lilt – these are purely examples of where these can go and should not be considered definitive or concrete! Three or four slurs per 8-bar section is plenty.

Tobin’s Jig slursDownload