Tunes in 6/8 – New Ealing Sessions

Mynydd Yr Heliwr

*Apologies for the spelling mistake! This will be rectified shortly – it’s Mynydd, not Mynnyd*

A lovely Dorian mode (the modal minor that has a raised sixth, in this case a C#) jig from Wales.

Rondeau du Blaireau

Welcome back everyone! We’ve kicked off with an amazing French tune by the wonderful La Lampe a Folk; Rondeau du Blaireau.

Our accompanying pattern was as follows, creating a hypnotic texture (two-bar pattern in an ascending scale pattern):

Here’s the tune:

Rondeau du blaireau Download

Tunes from Tom

Here are the tunes covered by Tom at the end of June:

Go to Berwick, Johnny – Full Score Download

The Rolling Wave – Full Score Download

Riddle’s Hornpipe – Full Score Download

Peacock Follows the Hen v3 Download

Queen’s Jig

It’s a Playford tune! We need it for the ECDC visit! I will update the info at a later date! Here it is:

Queen’s Jig Download

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 slurs Download

Hardiman’s Fancy

Here’s Irish tune Hardiman’s Fancy from guest tutor Tom Newell. Now with added chords!

Hardiman’s Fancy – Full Score Download

Jigolo

Here are the videos and dots for Jigolo, a Welsh tune by Iolo Jones – we’ll be sticking with this one for a few weeks as well as returning to The Mallard and trying various things there too.

Try adding joining notes between A section repeats and B sections too, notes above or below the main notes work well, or a D of some description can also sound good.

jigolo-1 Download

jigalo-in-a-major Download

The Mallard revisited

The Mallard is a tune from a long time ago! I wanted to revisit it and to potentially pair it with Enfield Wash, though I found it a bit notey and so wanted to simplify it a little.

Stage one: we took out as many notes as we could until we had the bare skeleton of the tune – but it still had to be recognisable as the tune.

Stage two: we add notes back in, either from the original tune or using similar figures.

Stage three: as we tried things out, I wrote down some of the ideas that came out. The two versions below represent some of the ideas that came out during that experimentation. They are not supposed to be definitive versions but rather examples of what can happen if you play around with a tune in this way.