I was struck, when checking in Dixon, how sparingly he used 2+2+2+3 in 9/4 tunes. Obviously 3+3+3 is where those tunes' home rhythm was. So presumably the 3+3+3 was still going in his head.
John -----Original Message----- From: Matt Seattle [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: 21 July 2008 10:32 To: Gibbons, John Cc: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; nsp@cs.dartmouth.edu Subject: Re: [NSP] Re: Rusty Gulley Good examples, John. Everything you mention here I would consider as syncopation rather than change of metre, or in the case of Risty Gulley, alternating metre. Maybe this is a too-subtle distinction, but it's one that I experience. I use syncopation a lot in my own playing, and for me it works precisely because the underlying 'straight' rhythm is there as a context for the sophisticated syncopations snaking sinuously out of my chanter. AFAIK no other sources notate RG in alternating metre. Why would they? It's simply wrong. Not to put too fine a point on it, Vickers was 'sort-of' musically literate - he knew what he meant, but didn't write it 'correctly'. When *played in G*, does Jack Lattin have one sharp, as everyone else plays it, or three sharps, as Vickers writes? Numerous other examples can be cited. One thing I learnt in the 21-year gap between my editions of Vickers was context. There is a huge contextual literature around many of these tunes; when the only person saying something different from *everyone else* is not known for his accuracy he is not necessarily the genius who is the only one to discern the truth, even if some of us find his quirks appealing. To get on or off this list see list information at http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
