Frank Nordberg writes:
| [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
| >
| > Are there any abc archives out there which indicate what chords to play for tunes
|from the O'Neill books?
|
...
| For the benefit of recent subscribers to abcusers, here's a short
| outline of the history of the O'Neill projects:
| A group of people lead (eventually) by John Chambers made a joint effort
I should point out that Dan Beimborn was the prime mover in this
project. I transcribed a few hundred tunes, and then took it off
Dan's hands when he lost his original web space. But Dan should get
the credit for making it happen in the first place.
| to transcribe O'Neill's "Music of Ireland" ("O'Neill's 1850"). While
| that work was in progress, me and Paul Kinder transcribed "Dance Music
| of Ireland" ("O'Neill's 1001") and "Waifs and Strays" respectively.
| The three projects was originally independent of each other, but
| eventually ended up as a big "O'Neill" project at John Chamber's site
| (soon to be mirrored at Musica Viva).
Mirroring is a good idea. Of course, it makes fixing typos harder,
but it increases availability.
| All the O'Neill ABCs are basically "urtext", that is they include the
| tunes the way O'Neill published them with as little as possible added or omitted.
Yup; this was a clear policy from the start. O"Neill didn't always
use the best notation. He sometimes got the key signature wrong, for
example, using classical major/minor signatures and accidentals to
get the proper mode. But that doesn't really matter. His books are
historical documents, and really shouldn't be corrected.
OTOH, there has been occasional discussion of an O'Neill's Version 2
that would correct problems and maybe even include (simple) chords.
| The next logical step would, of course, be to create a critical edition
| of all three collections. That is easier said than done, though, partly
| because of the sheer volume of music (3186 ABCs!), but also because of
| the responsibility the editor(s) would have to accept. There's lots of
| ambiguity in the O'Neill books and who's got the nerve and right to
| claim that his or her interpretation is the "correct" one?
This would indeed be a LOT of work. Chords in particular are a
problem, because there are so many alternatives. If I were to do it,
I'd probably insist on giving really simple, basic chords. Musicians
can always add in fancier chords themselves, of course.
But I suspect that it'll only happen the way it's happening now. You
can grab a tune from the collection and make your own version with
things like chords. Lots of people have done this.
The main things that I'd like to see in an extended release are the
alternate titles, plus the B and D header fields. A lot of this info
is in the Fiddler's Companion site (http://www.ceolas.org/tunes/fc/).
But extracting such information and putting it into ABC header form
could take a bit of work.
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