Category: Tunes in 2 or 4

Mr Moore’s Hornpipe

Here’s our tune from Monday 29th, Mr Moore’s Hornpipe. It’s widely used as a Border Morris tune, first (it seems) by the team Boggart’s Breakfast – the tune appears to come from the Thomas Watts manuscript of the late 18th century, from the Peak Forest in Derbyshire (researched by Brian Peters of Glossop). The tune as I know it is a little different from the manuscript,  I think this is most likely the ‘session effect’ where tunes get tweaked and rounded out over time.

Here’s the tune in action, in the dance Lorenz’s Shiny New Butterfly by Sheffield border Morris team Boggart’s Breakfast:

Swanton Abbot Hornpipe

A tune from Norfolk, the Swanton Abbot Hornpipe (originally just called Hornpipe) collected by George Watson in the late 1800s. There is a nice write up on the Village Music Project website about the Watson collection, for anyone who’s interested.

swanton abbotDownload

You’ll notice that the chords don’t resolve the D at the end of each section – this is on purpose! We often think of a 32 bar tune as being just that but in reality the tune will be played four or five times in a row, and so the constant return to the tonic key at the end of each section can become somewhat tedious. While we won’t use the G chords every time, this serves as a reminder to think of the whole arc of the repeated tune and not just the short, written down tune that we see in the notation.

Here’s a fantastic version of the tune by Nick Wyke and Becki Driscoll

https://nickwykeandbeckidriscoll.bandcamp.com/track/george-watsons-hornpipe

And a very different version by Dave Shepherd:

UPDATE:

Here’s a PDF of the accompaniment pattern, with its stereo effect:

swanton abbot w harmDownload

and a video of the accompaniment alone (beginning) and with the tune (from 1:46) – my phone hasn’t picked up the pattern very well, but you can hear it in places.

The Rights of Man

The tune from June 9th, as requested by Mary D, The Rights of Man. This is a hornpipe that was first published in the 1870s, it’s played widely across Ireland, Scotland and England. I’ve included two chord progressions (as PDFs), we will examine the effects of these next week, amongst other things.

Here’s a video (with focus on violin left hand) with some of the variations we tried, there are also some interesting sound recordings on the TuneArch.org page.

The Rights of Man 1Download
The Rights of Man 2Download

Lucky Scaup

A cheerful tune to start back, this is Lucky Scaup, or Lucky Scaupie, a Scottish tune that I got from a Jimmy Shand album.

I believe that Lucky Scaup refers to an old Folly in Tayport, near Dundee. It was built in the 1860s and demolished in the 1979 when it had become unstable and potentially dangerous.

The structure is AAB, as the B section is long and references the A at the end. The D/F# chords (and others in this format) mean play a D chord with an F# in the bass if possible.

Lucky Scaupie PDFDownload

Here is the recording I learned it from, our tune starts at 1:08.

The Bath Hornpipe

Welcome back! We started the term with a jolly, bouncy tune called The Bath Hornpipe, from a manuscript of collector Frank Kidson. This tune turns up in various Yorkshire collections from around the 1840s and 1850s, sometimes under this title and sometimes as Newton’s Hornpipe. We are playing it as a dotted hornpipe… for now!

Here are the dots and video:

The Bath HornpipeDownload

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!