To my ear the best thing about the Peacock with Gg drones is the
prominent clashing f#, which resolves to a d; it is a strongly
emphasised note in the 'C major' strains. BP would have a high g nat
here instead but Peacock was stuck with f# on NSP and seems to have
gloried in it.
An important bit of advice when discussing Royal Compositions,
is NEVER EVER CRITICISE THEM!
This is because you never have any idea who wrote the things
John
In a message dated 29/04/2012 20:02:33 GMT Daylight Time,
ross.ander...@cl.cam.ac.uk writes:
There wer
I once wondered if the ballad fits the tune - can you sing it in 9/4?
The answer is a tentative yes... But it isn't as obvious as I'd like.
I have not checked every verse.
The ballad seems to be a local analogue of a Robin Hood one, with
Carlisle for Nottingham etc,
Adam a B
If that recent footage of a mammoth-shaped object fording a river in
Chukhotka in the Russian Far East turns out not to have been faked,
then presumably the species goes on the CITES list pretty sharpish, and
carrying smallpipes across borders gets harder...
John
In a messag
In response to an unmet need for harvest tunes, and incidentally tunes
commemorating Northumbrian wildlife, I was inspired to write this after
an afternoon's piping with Edmund in Northumberland,
when Edmund, Gisela and I all went for a walk afterwards...
X:1
T:The Harvest Mit
Two or three from Vickers - The Kirn Staff (Kirn = Corn, as in Kirn
Supper) and the Threshers,
also perhaps The Hare in the Corn,
though the hare being in the corn is more of a problem before you have
cut it.
You'd expect musicians at a Kirn supper.
There are probably a f
In a message dated 17/07/2011 20:33:27 GMT Daylight Time,
barr...@nspipes.co.uk writes:
Just because a piece breaks some notional (artificial?) rules,
doesn't
make it bad music.
Oddly, I don't think W on the W does break any rules in this sense.
Except for our preferen
In a message dated 17/07/2011 17:07:14 GMT Daylight Time,
oatenp...@googlemail.com writes:
http://www.northumbrianpipers.org.uk/pipersforum/viewtopic.php?f=18&;
t=206
Dave is right, Dunk meant it to be in ternary form.
A, B, A', with A' being an ornamented recap leading int
A good point - but if a musical style has any merit, it's worth
studying for musical reasons alone.
That's why, in Ireland, so many non-Kerrymen play slides and polkas
John
In a message dated 30/06/2011 20:51:14 GMT Daylight Time,
oatenp...@googlemail.com writes:
Adrian,
I stand corrected
Only the one known example, I take it?
How do you mean part-Union?
Do you mean a wholly keyed NSP chanter,
cylindrical bored and closed ended, but with UP drones and regulators?
I must go and look at it - even if they (it?) never caught on,
One obvious response is that playing finger holes on NSP is faster and
more 'positive' than playing keyed notes. Half of this may be down to
the poor dexterity of the little finger, but I can't play
even thumb-keyed notes as crisply as open-holed ones. There's something
in Tom Clough
Before the tuning fork was invented, there were pitch pipes.
John
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UHU is a pain if you need to get in there, though.
Shellac is at least easy to soften.
John
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Is 'The rotting of the cotton threads' the title of a tune I haven't
learned yet?
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Almond is still popular for woodwind, and has been for 250 years or
more.
John
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And gold is amazingly soft, so won't wear well.
John
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Brass is not gunmetal.
With gunmetal, iron oxide forms a thin airtight layer for a while,
protecting the metal underneath, at least till proper rust gets going.
With brass, the same is not true for copper and its alloys.
So corrosion doesn't prevent further corrosion.
Fu
70>66.6... = 2/3 semitone = 1/3 tone.
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As many notes on an NSP chanter can be bent about a quarter tone
without putting the drones far out - at least on a good reed day - I
guess one difference between a good piper and a fairly good one is the
former will squeeze notes into tune unconsciously and accurately, the
latter co
It might be worth analysing recordings of a good piper or two playing
in E minor and in G, to see if they squeeze the B that little bit
harder in the minor tunes, to bring it more in tune with the E/B
drones.
They may not do it consciously, but the B that's a true third above G
A 70 cent divergence between one set of pipes and another is alarming!
More than a third of a tone in old money.
We are approaching the territory of that Irish flute player I
mentioned.
A tactful cull of the outliers might be a good idea -
'Your pipes are more suitable for sol
"only one finger off at a time"
is usually read as being about open-fingered ornaments,
or the horrible slurred playing some people go in for.
No need to make a fetish of it, avoiding vibrato too.
I've heard at least 3 excellent close fingered pipers advising using
vibrato in
One thing I like about NSP is the way vibrato alters the colour, rather
than the volume of a note.
You can emphasise higher harmonics this way, and Billy Pigg seemed to
use this a lot in The Lark in the Clear Air, for example.
As for apples and potatoes - in Cologne they have 'Hi
With me, the addiction only in the severe writing form since I got some
NSP in 97 -
but I'd been a Peacock addict since Cut and Dry Dolly came out in the
70's,
and I bought the facsimile edition which I treasure to this day.
Writing set in once I realised Peacock, Bewick and Cl
Thanks for the hint, Matt.
I went back and found it in Ryan's Mammoth Collection - I'd missed it
before.
For those that don't know this collection, it was published 'about
1883' in Boston, Mass.
The Golden Eagle certainly doesn't sound like it was written too long
before t
Well remembered!
It's also a grand tune.
John
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A way of notating hornpipes that's not too hard to read, and
corresponds pretty closely to the actual rhythm I want to play, is
alternate dotted and undotted quavers. That is 20/16, unfortunately,
but it is the only way I can get Noteworthy to play anything that
sounds like a hornpip
Julia,
What was set in a competition 15 years ago may no longer be of as much
interest as it was then, and is surely going to be a pain to retrieve.
But is there a log of what non-set tunes people have actually won with
more recently?
John
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Bob,
I know nothing about pipemaking, but in good years there is one nsp
event in Scotland (only just) - see
[1]http://www.newcastleton.com/intro.html.
But the nsp competition will be uncontested if nobody goes there. This
has happened some years, I think.
John
--
Breathnach is a good source of advice here - I recall he said something
I'd paraphrase as:
"Tune titles are dummy labels for the tunes, without a 'real' meaning
of their own.
It is futile to enquire about 'The Mason's Apron' whether a
stonemason's or freemason's apron is mean
In a message dated 07/02/2010 13:39:07 GMT Standard Time,
i...@gretton-willems.com writes:
But did you know that a recent survey showed that 96.83%
of people who say that they "don't like Wagner's operas" have never
actually
heard or attended one? ;-)
Cheers,
Pa
[1]http://www.answers.com/topic/zampogna-2
says, inter alia,
"Traditionally the bags are made from goat hides that are removed from
the slaughtered animal in one piece, cured, turned inside out, then
tied off just in front of the rear legs, one of the front legs serving
to h
Philip,
You wrote::
John's post about Helmholtz resonators seems to
suggest that a long narrow neck would cause more (or at least
different)
resonance problems than a bag where the neck opens out broadly from
the
narrowest point at the stock, "
I did the sum
PS 'Inverted' is upside down; inside out is 'everted'.
Ask any topologist, or classicist...
John
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I always understood the point of the open-cell foam in the neck is to
remove the neck resonance problem referred to earlier. The frequency of
this resonance depends critically on the shape - if you model the bag
as a big cavity with a narrow tubular neck,like a bottle, the formula
fo
The pipes and the kingdom belong to different eras -
the Northumbrian pipes reached something like their modern form in a
similar time and place to the steam locomotive.
But they were called 'Northumberland pipes' then, as were their simpler
'unimproved' pre-Peacock version.
or the difference between a Scottish smallpipe player and a small
Scottish pipe player
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A lyric fragment, sung to the tune, eg 'All the Night I Lay with Jockey
in my Arms', or
-failing this - a dummy lyric including the title, can help - make up
your own examples, as daft ones of your own invention stick better.
Remembering the first bar or 2 of the tune, with the sou
The trouble is some think 'reading music' and 'reading music notation'
are synonymous -
the trick is to read the dots and put the music back into them.
I guess the player who can only play from a notated copy she'd just
written down, on hearing,,
would be a good ear-player if
But remembering the words of a speech, writing them down verbatim,
then being unable to remember them again without reading the transcript
is plain weird
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Maybe we should sort out the more literal dot-readers with more
accurate notation.
Notereader makes Hornpipes sound fairly good in 21/16, with dotted and
undotted quavers alternating.
12/8 is too jiggy, straight quavers have no pulse,
and normal 'dotted 4/4' is lumpier than sch
Adrian,
Your message about a variant of The Barrington read as though it should
have had a copy of the tune MS attached, but there was nothing there.
Did you forget, or did it get stripped? The list server does strip
messages of all attachments - very Buddhist.
I'd be interest
Francis,
Is the widespread use of synthetic pads in (mouth blown) orchestral
woodwinds nowadays down to the fact that they operate in (often very)
moist environments, which would presumably affect leather much more
than a water-repellent plastic foam?
The bore of NSP is oily
Makes more sense than 'Hyperacoustics', anyway
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It's a hornpipe, because J.L. Dunk said it was, and he wrote it;
it's a rant because if you play it that way - as everyone does - it
makes sense.
For more by Dunk, see
[1]http://www.archive.org/details/hyperacoustics02dunk
John
--
References
1. http://www.archive.o
A couple of other meanings in [1]http://www.dsl.ac.uk/
but none that seem to fit the Cut and Dry context convincingly.
John
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1. http://www.dsl.ac.uk/
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Perhaps if we take the John Bell version (on FARNE) as the basic tune,
the tag at the middle and end of the strain has the rhythm
| qq c qq q...|
this would fit ...|Cut and Dry Do-ol-ly ...|
But you need to stretch the first syllable of Dolly across two notes.
These 2 note
Can anyone with access to an OED or a Northumbrian dialect dictionary
check this possible meaning of 'dolly' = peat-stack? It would be
plausible enough if 'dolly' used to hold this meaning. Though is 'a
small peat stack, ready to be taken from the moor for burning' a likely
topic for
That article was a good one - not only did it tell me about the
existence of other versions of Cut and Dry than Peacock's, (some are on
Farne now) but rather successfully proved the point that written
traditions are as fluid as oral ones; if a bit slower.
But no light on what the ti
A lot of these BL recordings are annotated with helpful titles like
'Unidentified Tune' or 'Hornpipe'.
I have identified a couple so far.
If anyone can point to a specific recording, and identify the sequence
of tunes, I can add a note.
Non-UK-academics aren't trusted, apparent
The "Most illuminating" was in response to that message of John Dally's
beginning, eloquently,
"SG93IG5vc3RhbGdpYyBJIGFtIGZvciB0aG9zZSBoYWxjeW9uIGRheXMgb2YgYmxpc3NmdW
wgaWdu
b3JhbmNlIHdoZW4gdGhlIGdvZHMgb2YgdGhlIE5QUyBkaWQgbm90IGNhc3QgdGh1bmRlciB
ib2x0
cyBkb3duIGZyb20gTXQuIE9
Most illuminating!
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Are these the guys at Dflat house in Camden?
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Is there any software available which will input interminable arguments
about the Pipers' Society rulebook, and output intelligent discussion
about the instrument and its music?
John
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Maybe your violin teacher was teaching you classical style along with
the good basic violin technique, and the classical style was impeding
your traditional style. Two styles can be inconsistent. Doing one well
might well mean doing the other badly. A classical violinist might try
to
While many NSPers both can play by ear and can read and write music,
the main problem is not that nobody writes the music down, but rather,
that many players prefer, on hearing a tune in a session or playaround,
to ask what book it's in, dig out the notes, and start playing from the
dots. Some
Printing does give a mirror image, so unless the artist flips it in his
head, that's what you get.
John
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In a message dated 14/01/2009 00:24:15 GMT Standard Time,
richard.hea...@tiscali.co.uk writes:
http://nms.scran.ac.uk/database/record.php?usi=000-000-579-620-C
UP chanter all right, on the knee, but more like BP drones?
The artist doesn't show what the tune looked like though!
SMM has the strathspey tune - see
[1]http://www.burnsscotland.com/database/record.php?usi=000-000-499-837
-C&PHPSESSID=mogu4k310q5f4sje49tpggju04&scache=1i8i6q4yll&searchdb=scra
n
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References
1.
http://www.burnsscotland.com/database/record.php?usi=000-000-499-837-C&PHPSE
Are you saying these words
'Come gie's a sang Montgomery cried ...'
fit the 'Reel of Tullochgorum' tune (they do) or the ex-strathspey
that's found in Peacock (they fit that too).
The difference between gobstopper and tomato soup is obscured by the
stress of the verse.
The first page Google turned up on 'And they call I Buttercup Joe'
said:
The words of this music hall song were published in the National Prize
Medal Song Book in 1872, and they also appear in an undated copy in the
Firth collection in the Bodleian Library, which provides the addi
The two books NSP1 and the Charlton Memorial book are a good overview
of the repertoire - what people actually played - as seen in the
mid-20th century.
The Peacock collection does the same job for the beginning of the 19th,
and so contains a higher proportion of purpose-built sma
Good point John Dally made - perhaps this explains why there's such a
split in repertoires?
If you like the effect of drone harmony you will like Peacock, Bewick,
Clough tunes -
but if the drones are just something you tune to the tonic and
dominant, then forget about, you prefe
Rob's calculation isn't that sensitive to whether the current standard
'traditional' G is taken 20, 25 or even 30 cents above concert F -
repeating it with this range of values only varies the pitch by a
couple of Hz - within the typical range of fluctuations anyway
John
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To
Nobody has yet mentioned
'Fairly, fairly, fairly shot of her, buried my wife and danced on top
of her'
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There is something similar in the 1st half bar of Keelman Ower Land.
There it is dc/B/A/G, with the NM version putting a triplet on the
c/B/A/, to get the time right, but making it harder to play. I feel
dc/B/A/G/ is likelier.
It would be easy in a MS to not quite take the second b
In a message dated 18/11/2007 11:58:54 GMT Standard Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
http://www.milecastle27.co.uk/simulator/
Rob,
Well done!
A very useful & instructive widget - installing the soundbank was a bit
terrifying, but I managed once I started reading the instructions - doing wha
In a message dated 11/06/2007 20:29:19 GMT Daylight Time,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] writes:
http://www.chrisormston.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/exercises.htm
Chris,
Many thanks for the pdf of these - I recall you taking us through them at
Halsway once, and as long as I was using them for practice, the
Klaus,
If you want to play tunes in concert G and D, with a compass between D and
b, with the simplest possible fingerings (holes rather than keys) then a G
chanter is certainly what you need. If you use a D chanter you will have more
range for playing notes below this compass, but will lose
Exactly - just the melodic motifs that are used to build the variations in
Peacock.
Things like
BAGABG
or
G2 BcdB
or, building into an exercise...
GABG ABcA BcdB cdec defd efge g4
If you can play the Peacock variations fluently, you are doing fine.
John
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There's a story of a piper (Billy Pigg??) not being allowed to learn the
Barrington hornpipe till he'd mastered the relevant exercises, then he could
play it at once - one of these must have been a passage of parallel 6ths as in
the 2nd strain - maybe another for the semiquaver turn. Add som
---1178654244
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
In principle Nancy was right. But since it has been sitting in my BP library
bag for aeons, only played once, here's a scan to clog up your hard discs
with.
Perhaps you can
_www.bagpipe.de_ (http://www.bagpipe.de) says 'Bordunen'
John
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As an ex-physicist, my starting point for designing a G chanter would be to
reduce every linear dimension (bore, hole spacing, reed length, reed
thickness) of an F chanter by 10%, or for a D chanter, to increase by 20%. I
would
aim to raise the crow pitch by just under a tone or just over a
It does seem a bit odd that a G chanter and F chanter have reeds crowing at
different notes, a third apart, and of significantly different sizes, but the
same reed works in a D and F chanter - is there some compensation in the
designs of the chanters? Or am I wrong?
John
--
To get
Steve's 'say a string quartet plus Ms Tickell with a
more traditional scoring,...'
and Max's KT + string quartet plus double bass,
with the smallpipes mostly alternating as soloist
with a cor anglais, are not that different.
A myth seems to be going around that the smallpipes
were pitted agai
It's a good piece, but not really drone music. Max did at least write a
piece which was properly tonal, unlike a lot he does. The traditional music he
hears most of is in Orkney, so expecting it to sound Northumbrian is perhaps a
bit hopeful. But the slow movement was beautiful.
John
Regular readers will know I'm not a fan of KT's usual playing style, but Max
has got some good piping out of her. Some of the crispest rapid staccato
I've ever heard her play. Some open fingered trills too, mind - are they Max's
or hers, or did they agree on them?
The piece is good to liste
The BBC Radio 3 website is up and running again - one can listen to Peter
Maxwell Davies' piece 'Kettletoft Inn' for NSP, cor anglais, string quartet and
double bass at
_http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/performanceon3/pip/vbngm/_
(http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/performanceon3/pip/vbngm/)
but pro
I must say that some of the best competition music I ever heard at Rothbury
was a variation set that should have been disqualified if the rules had been
enforced - on the other hand, last year's smallpipe competition, when the
rules were strictly applied, was relatively unsatisfying - there w
I superglue the cotton bud to a bamboo skewer - it does the job nicely.
John
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Just to tell you that 'smallpipe choyte' was a googleblast just now.
What usually happens is that everyone lists any observed googleblast on a
website, so if you want to see an example of this rare phenomenon, google it
now.
Almost unheard of to achieve it with related words, and hard enough
Maybe the Pipes of all nations 78 should be released - with a health warning!
I have never had the privilege of hearing it, though I have heard some
remarkable and memorable attempts by people who don't normally play in that
way.
The next war will probably be over how such a warning should b
Not much help in playing the variations, but the words of this broadside
ballad fit Peacock's tune.
_http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15803_
(http://www.nls.uk/broadsides/broadside.cfm/id/15803)
John
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So the debate has moved on from why highland graces are a bad idea, to the
question of which ones you can do. I suppose they aren't technically bad piping
if the chanter is properly closed between each note & the next, but the
idea does sound a bit wrong-headed. Is this what the instrument is
Note - 'My Ain Kind Dearie' = 'The Lea Rigges' is a fiddle tune originally.
So the articulation marks are likely copied after some 'primarily fiddle'
source. I would read the slurred passages as 'poco staccato', and the read the
long slurred runs as phrasings - shorten the last note to separa
>From her website:
=A9 2001 Kathryn Tickell
A _lazy grace_ (http://www.lazygrace.com/) production
My point exactly
John
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Steve,
Not a thin root, but the stem cetainly narrowed down rather drastically in
the 60's.
The remarkable thing is that the plant is now in a much healthier state than
for many years,
(not just many more pipers, but more good ones than there have been at any
time since the war? Depends wh
Dave,
A lot of these markings (not all) appear in the extended range tunes -
presumably transcribed/adapted fiddle tunes, and may be copieded from fiddle
articulations. Any known sources, Matt?
In the obvious pipe tunes, say Meggy's Foot, it is still possible to get a
gradation between sta
Steve,
You said "We now condemn "choyting" but it is only wth the advent of the
millenium that we were told we were doing wrong!"
Well, only then did we learn the word for it, but I think the idea
"staccato=good, slurred=bad" was fairly well established, with some stylistic
variants, more
John,
You are right about Auntie. Maybe I should put a 'Your 3' into Late Junction?
As for Kathryn, my opinion when I first heard her (long before I was a
piper) was that she had ferocious technique, but was a bit flash, and too fast.
I
thought she would settle down and become a fine and ta
No - are you?
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Calling people names is one thing, though I withdrew that comment;
calling them Nazis, because they hold different opinions to yourself, is a
sight worse.
If she can't or won't (won't, in her case) play properly at least her fans
should accept another's right to have an opinion about it.
J
John,
Have a listen to a bit of it at
_http://www.last.fm/music/Penguin+Cafe+Orchestra/_/Organum_
(http://www.last.fm/music/Penguin+Cafe+Orchestra/_/Organum)
+++
if you want to know what the fuss is about.
It's a nice composition, as far as I can tell from a 30" clip, b
Edwin,
I'll refer you to the original email.
Don't recall ever reading that one though
John
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I didn't get the 'gutter press' reference either -
unless they've started serialising the Mr Men books in the Sun!
All the best,
John
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I listened to the clip. Nice music, but not what I would call good piping.
The open fingered trills grate a bit, and the staccato was damn near
nonexistent!
Whom am I slagging off?
Oh, it's Ms Tickle
John
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Not only is Audacity (fairly) easy to use to slow down or shift the pitch of
a tune, so (e.g.)Chris Ormston's 'I Saw my Love' can be brought down to F
and a bit from F#, and reduced to mortal speed, but you can zoom in to see
exactly how staccato the notes are - better than mine, for sure. I
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