John Chambers writes:
>From The Norton Manual of Music Notation, First Edition (Heussenstamm,
| 1987):
|
| "If a passage is to be repeated from the beginning of a piece, only one
>Yup; and there ain't a whole lot you're gonna do to fight this,
>unless you can somehow get control of all ABC software and add code
>to make it illegal.
>
Nor should one even try. As has been pointed out, there's a school
of notation out there---Kerr, O'Neill, et. al. which omits initial repeats
because they simply aren't necessary...in that particular music. Irish and
Scottish dance music, is (uaually) so regular, with such a simple repeat
structure (tunes are divided into parts, each part is played once or twice,
as the case may be, and on to the next) that the algorithm "when you hit a
repeat sign, go back to the end of the last part," is sufficient for the
vast majority of the tunes; there's no ambiguity. For the exceptions, one
can always put in the start-repeats. In fact, most of the old collections
only give the bare bones of the tunes: no decorations, second endings are
skipped, etc., because the musicians who play them were---and are---are
supposed to flesh them out, add gracenotes and variations to taste, and
figure out the correct pickup notes when necessary. (Not entirely dissimilar
to the situation of figured bass in early music, which came up in another
thread.)
It might be interesting to check the old collections to see if those
arranged with piano accompaniment (which would be more for non-trad players)
are more punctilious about begin-repeats.
Just to add a couple of data points to John's list, I checked some
of the works on my shelves for the use of initial repeats. I'd guess that
most of the Irish collections that omit begin-repeats follow O'Neill. But
O'Neill himself was very much aware of the significant---and
insignificant--collections preceeding him, so it's quite possible he himself
adopted the convention from Kerr or someone else. Is there any evidence
that this originated before Kerr?
Anyway:
These used start-repeats:
Geoghegan's Tutor for the Pastoral or New Bagpipe, London, ca 1746.
(Usually ends lines with the double repeat ::)
John Murphy's collection for violin, violincello and pianoforte,
(Edinburgh, 1809)
Colclough's Tutor for the UP, ca 1830
Scanlon's Gaelic Collection for the violin, (San Francisco, 1930s?)
Roche's collection, 1911
Heather Clarke's Tutor for the UP (1988, the standard UP tutor these
days. She also uses the naked colon to start repeats which begin a line, a
practice probably picked up from Pat Mitchell.)
Ceol Rince na h'Eireann (Breathnach's collection, (Dublin, 1963)
And a couple which were mentioned already:
Cole's (nee Ryan's Mammoth Collection, late 1800s)
Krassen's version of O'Neill's (editorial slag: not significant.
Krassen "corrected" O'Neill's errors to make room for his own.)
These ones don't:
Leo Rowsome's UP tutor, Dublin
Armagh Pipers Club Tutor
Bulmer and Sharpley (Actually, they used begin-repeats for about the
first ten tunes of volume 1, then stopped.)
Ceol An Phiobaire, (Dublin, 1971--78) (This is a book of
transcriptions, and start repeats are occasionally used to get the pickup
notes right.)
O'Neill also published collections arranged for the piano, which one
might expect to have the begin-repeats spelled out, but the only one I have
at hand is his Waifs and Strays of Gaelic Melody, which doesn't use them.
I also checked the more careful of the modern transcriptions, of
Patsy Tuohey by Mitchell and Small, and of James Morrison, Michael Coleman,
and Paddy Killoran by David Lyth, and, surprise: no begin-repeats...in
fact...no repeats at all. Evidently musicians of that calibre repeat a part
note-for-note so seldom that repeats aren't worthwhile. I did find a couple
in in another collection of careful transcriptions, the Dance Music of
Willie Clancy, by Pat Mitchell...tho I had to look hard. The repeats always
have begin-repeat attached. Interestingly enough, Mitchell contributed a
large number of the tunes in Ceol An Phiobaire, sans start-repeats. There
are a couple of peculiarities, already remarked in this thread:
begin-repeats which start a staff are marked with a naked colon. The treble
clef sign is only on the first staff of a tune, while the key signature
heads every staff. When a begin repeat coincides with a barline, and is not
at the start of a tune, they write: heavy double barline, key signature, and
colon in that order. So that every staff after the first starts with a bar
line; then comes the key sig, and after that, the music.)
Cheers,
John Walsh
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