Re: [scots-l] solfa
Nigel Gatherer wrote: Jack Campin wrote: ...I have occasionally thought about implementing an ABC-to-solfa translator. The bit I don't have a tool to do is a solfa font... Showing my ignorance here, but wouldn't any non-proportional font do, such as Courier? It's got wee punctuation-like thingies which are its real secret. I have no idea what they do. Jack can obviously read them so he knows what the system is able to convey. David Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Silvery Voe
| John Chambers wrote: | | ...it's on page 37. Here it is... | | Without intending to be aggressive or confrontational, I'm curious | about your stance on this, John. It's a modern tune composed by a | someone who has been dead well short of 70 years; it can be found in a | currently available printed collection. Do you feel that it's OK to | publish it? Hmmm ... Good question. I'd think there are possibly two answers in this case, which may or may not be similar. From what I know of Tom, having only met him a couple of times at musical events and not being anything more than a casual acquaintance, I'd say it's pretty obvious that he would have approved. It was always clear that he was mainly motivated by a desire to get as many people involved with the music as possible. Thus, in Ringing Strings he says about the tunes I hope that fiddlers find something interesting in some of them, and if they get as much enjoyment from playing the tunes as I have had from composing them then I will be very happy. Then he adds Tune up, let's play and dance. This does seem to be consistent with everything else he ever said or wrote. On the other hand, since Tom is gone, his works are now presumably in the hand of various others who may or may not have this generous sort of attitude. In particular, publishers often take a less than open view of people sharing the contents of their publications. There are many cases of publishers taking a radically different attitude than their authors. So maybe it would be worthwhile to inquire about who now owns Tom's tunes, and whether they view the tunes as a source of income or as Tom's gift to the world. A bit of checking on the net didn't quickly turn up information about who now owns the tunes or publications. As near as I can tell, Hand me Doon the Fiddle is out of print. Ringing Strings is for sale by a few outlets, and is probably in print, but it's not in the catalog of the Shetland Times, the publisher of my copy. They do list a book called The Tom Anderson Collection which I'm tempted to order even without seeing what's in it. I wonder who might have it? Or maybe I should just order it from the Shetland Times. One curiosity is that I found a number of references to the Shetland Musical Heritage Trust, including a comment that they're the current publishers of Tom's music, but their web site doesn't seem to mention him anywhere. I also tried to locate some of the names in Ringing Strings, such as Robert Innes and Ian Holland, without much luck. Robert was at the University of Stirling, but they don't list him anywhere, so I suppose he's moved on. Anyway, I've sent off a few email messages about Tom's books and tunes, and maybe I'll get some responses. I've thought for some time that I'd like to see his tunes, both his compositions and his collections of trad tunes, online. The latter we could just do, of course, but we'd want to get permission for the former. Now that the world's archives are rapidly moving online, a good way to memorialize Tom's contributions to the music of Shetland and Scotland would be to make a Tom Anderson site. If his conservators agree ... Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] What makes a style Scottish?
[high G in the pipe scale] The sharpened note is not out of tune. It is imitative of the *correct* sharp pitch of the appropriate note on (in this case) Border pipes. Yeah, but. This is a modern guess. Surviving old Border chanters have often had this note drastically recut to sharpen it, as if the expected pitch (and presumably the repertoire of tunes being played) had changed a lot over the years. It isn't clear that in-between was seen as the ideal place to be, just that it suited later tunes better than the flat seventh, even if you couldn't chisel and file it all the way up to G#. I don't think the definitive explanation of what's going on here can be purely in terms of instrument characteristics. Even purely vocal melodies sometimes demand that the low G be definitely natural while the exact pitch of the high one doesn't matter very much; nobody makes pipes with a sharp low G, though it's just as easy to do as the normal construction. Saying a choice of pitch is a result of the way pipes are made begs the question of why the pipes were made that way in the first place. Which is a matter of music rather than carpentry. Odd thing is that similar brief bursts of 'drone' occur in smallpipe playing What do you mean? The actual drones don't do brief bursts; are you talking about using a chanter note as a secondary pedal by filling in the subsidiary beats with it? [ringing strings on fiddles] Now I may be told that exactly the same things happen in Irish or English, Welsh or Appalachian music (or if Jack's reading, Turkish) so this may not be Scottish style. Doesn't have to be exclusively Scottish to be Scottish... You certainly do get the same thing in Appalachian fiddling (listen to Bruce Molsky), and in Scandinavian styles. You don't in Turkish playing on either kind of keman (a word used for both Western fiddles and for an instrument from Central Asia resembling the Chinese er-hu), as they are played in as vocal a manner as possible. You get a LOT of it in Black Sea fiddling (using the kemence, shaped like the old European kit) but as that's tuned in fourths, played with lots of double-stops and three- strings-at-once bowing, it sounds really different; the least vocal music imaginable, with the highest metronome speeds ever found in the field anywhere, accelerating up to 900bpm in one of Picken's transcriptions. English in former times I'm not sure about. The English were the first people in the British Isles to use the fiddle for folk music, and if we are to believe the illustrations in Playford's books from the 1650s, the kind of fiddle they used was the kit. Did English kits of this period have flattish or highly arched bridges? There must be surviving examples. Not sure there any 17th century kits surviving that were definitely used in Scotland, though the instrument must have got here. === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] solfa
...I have occasionally thought about implementing an ABC-to-solfa translator. The bit I don't have a tool to do is a solfa font... Showing my ignorance here, but wouldn't any non-proportional font do, such as Courier? The octaving signs are the main problem; the lower one doesn't occur in ASCII (it has to be distinguished from a comma, which is used like a dot in staff notation) and both are kerned so as to take up no horizontal space. In Curwen's work the upper octave is also distinct from the single-quote sign, which is used as a staccato mark. One way to do this would be to have three copies of the lower-case alphabet: normal, lower-octave and upper-octave. (Curwen goes beyond that into double-octave signs, but there can't be much vocal music intended for human beings that ranges so far). The letter forms of solfa are usually Courier-like, but Curwen's own book uses space-squeezing to place the beats evenly, regardless of how many notes there are on the line, so a fixed-width font wouldn't work. Gaelic songbooks tend not to do this, as far as I can tell, but they usually don't have as many notes per line either. Sometimes you find the chromatic modifiers printed smaller, so that se takes up the same horizontal spce as s. There is a less important issue with boldness. Solfa is usually set bold, with the punctuation signs even bolder. When you make Courier bold (at least on the Mac) the punctuation isn't noticeably bolded at all. Some other things are different sizes in solfa, notably the bar line, which is bigger than a | sign in Courier. I don't think we have any solfa users on this list. I'll try to pick a Gaelic singer pal's brains next weekend and find out what she think's important about the appearance of the score. She also has very poor eyesight, which means she'll have stricter criteria of readability. === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] What makes a style Scottish?
Jack Campin wrote: Odd thing is that similar brief bursts of 'drone' occur in smallpipe playing What do you mean? The actual drones don't do brief bursts; are you talking about using a chanter note as a secondary pedal by filling in the subsidiary beats with it? Probably. It usually sounds very droney or bass. Sort of punctuative farting. When I think about it is can also happen with what sound like random, loud 'noises off' which are clearly deliberate and not bass. It's an effect or technique I really like but have never tried to copy on a guitar :-) [ringing strings on fiddles] Now I may be told that exactly the same things happen in Irish or English, Welsh or Appalachian music (or if Jack's reading, Turkish) so this may not be Scottish style. Doesn't have to be exclusively Scottish to be Scottish... You certainly do get the same thing in Appalachian fiddling (listen to Bruce Molsky), and in Scandinavian styles. You don't in Turkish playing on either kind of keman (a word used for both Western fiddles and for an instrument from Central Asia resembling the Chinese er-hu), as they are played in as vocal a manner as possible. You get a LOT of it in Black Sea fiddling (using the kemence, shaped like the old European kit) but as that's tuned in fourths, played with lots of double-stops and three- strings-at-once bowing, it sounds really different; the least vocal music imaginable, with the highest metronome speeds ever found in the field anywhere, accelerating up to 900bpm in one of Picken's transcriptions. Help! Throw all those books from 300 years ago with 72-80 bpm as the natural state of human musical speed out of the window. What do they drink to go with this? English in former times I'm not sure about. The English were the first people in the British Isles to use the fiddle for folk music, and if we are to believe the illustrations in Playford's books from the 1650s, the kind of fiddle they used was the kit. Did English kits of this period have flattish or highly arched bridges? There must be surviving examples. Not sure there any 17th century kits surviving that were definitely used in Scotland, though the instrument must have got here. I always wonder whether instruments have changed, or artists just couldn't draw them. I think the MOMI website (Museum of Musical Instruments) has some examples of the ambiguity of f-hole shapes, body lengths etc in old woodcuts. David Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] solfa
I have a terrible allergy to solfa. ;) It's rather easy to create fonts in CorelDRAW! if you have a copy, you can export images to individual character numbers in a TrueType or Postscript font. I haven't tried this in the Mac version but it works nice in the Windows version. - Original Message - From: David Kilpatrick [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, July 16, 2001 11:31 AM Subject: Re: [scots-l] solfa Jack Campin wrote: The octaving signs are the main problem; the lower one doesn't occur in ASCII (it has to be distinguished from a comma, which is used like a dot in staff notation) and both are kerned so as to take up no horizontal space. Jack, I have Fontographer and used to write bitmap fonts back in the early 1980s, never done PS/TT for anything except a few symbols, but if it is a matter of creating these I could do so. I did an early music font version of Goudy or something for my brother a couple of years back, just to give him the right typography for the words. David Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] What makes a style Scottish?
David writes: | I always wonder whether instruments have changed, or artists just | couldn't draw them. I think the MOMI website (Museum of Musical | Instruments) has some examples of the ambiguity of f-hole shapes, body | lengths etc in old woodcuts. In some historical circles, looking for howlers in artistic works is an ongoing game. Artists historically have often been somewhat contemptuous of mere technical detail, and often painted things that are physically absurd or impossible. Musical instruments are among the most common examples, especially stringed instruments. I've seen any number of drawing or paintings of stringed instruments whose necks were at an angle to the top of the body, so that the strings would have to bend at the junction. For a more subtle one, you sometimes see bows drawn at an angle to the string. But players always learn that the bow must be at a right angle to the string to get a good sound. Such things have nothing to do with the musical culture or tradition; they're a matter of basic physics. So you can't trust artistic representations of musical instruments, unless you know that the specific artist was up to the task. Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] solfa
Jack Campin wrote: The octaving signs are the main problem; the lower one doesn't occur in ASCII... That's a nail in its coffin then. I've always been interested in solfa and have made a couple of half-hearted attempts to become proficient at it. When I discovered ABC I saw a strong relationship between them: both can convey music using tools which are easily accessed (in solfa, a typewriter or pen and paper; in ABC, a computer keyboard or pen and paper), or so I thought. If solfa can't be conveyed in ASCII what use is it? -- Nigel Gatherer, Crieff, Scotland [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.argonet.co.uk/users/gatherer/ Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] solfa
If solfa can't be conveyed in ASCII what use is it? Well, it can *roughly* be conveyed in ASCII, but you'd want to get it looking better than that for publication-quality. After all, you can do staff notation in typewriter art if you want. The main use is that lots of people know how to read it. Its main semantic advantage over ABC is that it's independent of absolute pitch, which is exploited by an associated culture that uses it for sight-singing; nobody trains singers to use ABC in that way. It also has a better way of representing duration; I try to use a similar scheme when writing ABC, by adding spacing. An example of something solfa can do that ABC can't: take a waltz tune with a trochaic metre and put a chord over beat 2 (see the Jimmy Shand Book of Waltzes for examples of this). In ABC there is no way to write that, chords have to synchronize with the start of a note. === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] Silvery Voe
[Tom Anderson] I don't have the full story, but I remember reading that there has been an ugly struggle over the rights of his music. If the Shetland Times has any say in the matter, don't expect them to hand over anything free of charge. Remember their lawsuit over the rival Shetland paper's website? (The first litigation in the world over plagiarism on the Web, if I remember right). === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
Re: [scots-l] What makes a style Scottish?
You don't [get ringing-string effects] in Turkish playing on either kind of keman (a word used for both Western fiddles and for an instrument from Central Asia resembling the Chinese er-hu), as they are played in as vocal a manner as possible. Brainfart. Keman means a Western fiddle or a thing like a vielle/rebec. The Central Asian doodad is a rebab. All three are played in similar vocal-melodic style. You get a LOT of it in Black Sea fiddling [...] the least vocal music imaginable, with the highest metronome speeds ever found in the field anywhere, accelerating up to 900bpm in one of Picken's transcriptions. Help! Throw all those books from 300 years ago with 72-80 bpm as the natural state of human musical speed out of the window. What do they drink to go with this? The local mind-bender is deli bal (mad honey), a psychedelic honey derived from the flowers of _Rhododendron ponticum_, the Pontic azalea, which also happens to be the commonest kind of rhododendron in Scotland. The flowers are supposed to have the desired effect even without being run through a bee. I have no personal experience of what that effect is. Apparently there is a description in Xenophon's _Anabasis_ but I haven't found it. The dances that go with this kind of fiddling are the usual Middle Eastern line or circle type, though you can't do much but pogo up and down or wobble enthusiastically during these ultra-fast breaks. Think of a fusion of Morris dancing and hard house. if we are to believe the illustrations in Playford's books from the 1650s, the kind of fiddle [English folk fiddlers] used was the kit. I always wonder whether instruments have changed, or artists just couldn't draw them. No artist could confuse a kit with a normal-shaped fiddle. The soundbox is only half as wide. === http://www.purr.demon.co.uk/jack/ === Posted to Scots-L - The Traditional Scottish Music Culture List - To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
