Following Steve’s transcription of Miss McLeod, the next one in the series has gone on-line.
As Steve explained in his introduction to Ms Mac, the whole idea of this board grew out of a need for some explanation about aspects of traditional playing. We intend to present a few transcriptions that will hopefully shed some light on these issues, and maybe get some discussion going.
The one here comes from a 1970s recording of the East Galway whistleplayer Kieran Collins. He played the reel Rolling in the Ryegrass and in his playing used a variety of changes in his ornamentation to bring this very simple structured tune to life and take away some of the monotony that would occur when playign the tune through three times unchanged. The playing is nice and steady and very much unhurried.
At a later date transcriptions from the whistleplaying of Willie Clancy will become available, I have finished a transcription of him playing The maid on the green. This one will illustrate the use of melodic variation as well as ornamentation in a lovely lively and varied performance. Steve is hoping to tackle a clip I send him of Willie playing The Flogging Reel. And one or two tunes from the whistle playing of East Clare whistle and flute-player Joe Bane are in the pipeline, illustrating his phrasing and rhythmic structure. After that we may branch out, into fiddling and piping territory.
On 2002-08-04 10:01, Teri-K wrote:
ABC was used for notation. See the FAQ for information and links to the ABC homepage. Highly recommended software at an extremely reasonable price.
Teri
OK, but I don’t see anything in the FAQ that addresses the issue of ABC… Possibly can’t see it for looking . But anyway, I use ABC frequently, and some program has to be used to generate the printable score from ABC, probably one of the Abc2Ps converters if Windows is being used. I use several converters, but don’t recognize the format produced on the Transcription pages. The question remains, which program was use to produce the score? Maybe Barfly? I would not recognize it since I am not of the Mac world. Seems that I recall that Peter is.
Sorry if I wasn’t clear in my previous post.
Added: Ah now I see it in the FAQ… Looking at the wrong FAQ.
Was the Concertina site converter use to produce the score?
[ This Message was edited by: CDon on 2002-08-04 12:07 ]
I’m not sure I understand your question as far as generating a printable/viewable score. I use ABC2Win which allows creation, editing, viewing, and printing (all-in-one). The file on Steve’s page is in png format (alternative to gif). I don’t know what process he used to create the picture (he’s not available today to answer that question) I would have saved the viewable score from ABC2Win as a picture file (png, gif, jpg, whatever) and plugged it into the html coding.
Thank you Peter for your contribution. This is a particularly good interpretation of the tune. Most I’ve heard tend to rush the melody and chop the phrasing. Matt Molloy’s version completely turned me off the tune, but this version lets it flow.
As a reaction to Weekenders remark, the version is not far removed from the usual way of playing but the reason for selecting it was just that. Collins used some lovely and simple devices to break the monotony of this very simple tune. He uses restaint and good taste. I think it’s a good example in this context, coming up with, say, what Bobby Casey’s does in Poll Ha’penny would be interesting but I think a lot of you would immediately switch off.
Rolling in the Ryegrass is actually a very good tune for this sort of approach, I enjoyed this version quite a bit, I play the tune somewhat different and have over the years arrived at a quite different set of things to do with it. I have considered going into that, illustrate a few different approaches to the same tune. We’ll see.
On 2002-08-04 12:44, Teri-K wrote:
I’m not sure I understand your question as far as generating a printable/viewable score. I use ABC2Win which allows creation, editing, viewing, and printing (all-in-one). The file on Steve’s page is in png format (alternative to gif). I don’t know what process he used to create the picture (he’s not available today to answer that question) I would have saved the viewable score from ABC2Win as a picture file (png, gif, jpg, whatever) and plugged it into the html coding.
Teri
Sorry if I am not clear… I know how to produce a printable score given the ABC text. Peter does not give the ABC text. The question is, very simply, what software does Peter use to produce the printable image from the ABC text (or perhaps he uses the Concertina site)?
On 2002-08-04 14:05, Peter Laban wrote:
As a reaction to Weekenders remark, the version is not far removed from the usual way of playing but the reason for selecting it was just that. Collins used some lovely and simple devices to break the monotony of this very simple tune. He uses restaint and good taste. I think it’s a good example in this context, coming up with, say, what Bobby Casey’s does in Poll Ha’penny would be interesting but I think a lot of you would immediately switch off.
Rolling in the Ryegrass is actually a very good tune for this sort of approach, I enjoyed this version quite a bit, I play the tune somewhat different and have over the years arrived at a quite different set of things to do with it. I have considered going into that, illustrate a few different approaches to the same tune. We’ll see.
I would enjoy seeing some examples of different approches to the same tune, as an illustration of how each player can make a tune his or her own.
On 2002-08-04 14:17, CDon wrote:
Peter does not give the ABC text. The question is, very simply, what software does Peter use to produce the printable image from the ABC text
I didn’t reply to this at first as I wrote the ABC in Word and sent that to Steve to stick on his website. We’ll have to wait for him to return and find out what he did.
On 2002-08-04 15:30, Peter Laban wrote:
I didn’t reply to this at first as I wrote the ABC in Word and sent that to Steve to stick on his website. We’ll have to wait for him to return and find out what he did.
Thanks Peter… I had realized myself that the question was being addressed to the wrong person. Steve will no doubt provide the answer at some convenient point.
CDon, ABC2Win displays an ABC tune as standard notation which you can print but doesn’t let you save it as a graphic image directly.
So what I do is use the option to save a copy of the notation page to the Windows clipboard as a .bmp image. You can then paste this image into a graphics program (I use Corel Presentations but anything would do), trim off the white space and save it as gif, png or other graphics format image.
I explain all this at the Brother Steve pages under “Using this site”. ABC2Win also has a help function, where if you look hard you can find the answer:
Copy/Paste
This button is THE one if you want to import pages of music into a word-processing or desktop publishing application, either as a bitmap file (.BMP), or as text (abc's).
Back to talking about the tune… I love this rendition and would like to hear more of K. Collins. RTE web radio, maybe?
[ This Message was edited by: StevieJ on 2002-08-04 16:25 ]
On 2002-08-04 16:24, StevieJ wrote:
CDon, ABC2Win displays an ABC tune as standard notation which you can print but doesn’t let you save it as a graphic image directly.
…
I explain all this at the Brother Steve pages under “Using this site”. ABC2Win also has a help function, where if you look hard you can find the answer:
Thank you Steve… I have been using AbcMus for a long time and had forgotten exactly how the ABC2Win format looks.
What you are doing with the transcriptions is really great idea… Thank you for this as well. Now, indeed, back to the tunes.
Back to talking about the tune… I love this rendition and would like to hear more of K. Collins. RTE web radio, maybe?
[ This Message was edited by: StevieJ on 2002-08-04 16:25 ]
Steve,
K. Collins is on RTE, but sadly only two recordings. Very good though. Interestingly enough (talking about comparisons), his version of the Mrs., er Miss is one of them.
Teri
[ This Message was edited by: teri-K on 2002-08-04 17:12 ]
[ This Message was edited by: teri-K on 2002-08-04 17:13 ]
I saw some footage of Collins on the archival programme ‘Come West along the Road’ that was quite nice.
A friend’s wife knew him fairly well during the late 70s and she recorded him a bit.
In october there’s a trad weekend in Gort every year in honour of Joe Cooley and K. Collins.
On 2002-08-04 14:05, Peter Laban wrote:
As a reaction to Weekenders remark, the version is not far removed from the usual way of playing but the reason for selecting it was just that. Collins used some lovely and simple devices to break the monotony of this very simple tune. He uses restaint and good taste.
I affirm that Peter, if it wasn’t understood. I am interested in the various ways players work within an environment of the known tunes then play with expectations. In this example, it seemed like the first half had some differences while the turn was more familiar. I could see doing just the opposite as well.
As an example, I am really fond of the Set Dance “The Hunt.” But the version I first learned has a real distinction from most others I have heard since, namely in the second complete measure of the B section, where it has three F natural quarters and and ed in the fourth beat instead.
It was really distincitve and quaint but the rest of the piece is pretty much in line with other versions. This was the place this person (Eamonn Jordan Whistle and Sing book) or body of persons chose to deviate. Plenty of restraint but…
For non-natives, its hard to know what is over the top, though, beyond our personal reactions.In other words, what raises eyebrows and what receives a pleased inner reaction to the variation.
The version of ‘The Hunt’ with the three f nats is the one O Neill had and Jordan probably copied it from that, or the concertinaplayers in Listowel he heard had it from O Neil’s.
The second part as I hear it played [Junior Crehan played it a lot but all he fiddlers from that corner play it, I heard Casey Ryan, Michael Downes etc all play it, Patrick Kelly called it the ‘Mount Phoebus Hunt’ and I think that version is very much the one I hear played most of the time] starts like this:
~G3 B d2 d2|(3efg fd e2 d2| e2 d g2 d etc completely avoiding the f nats.
The whole thing about flattened f and c [c and f neutral] is another thing that will have to come up, they are the big expressive notes and they can make or break a tune. Fixed pitch instruments have a problem there, these days mostly reverting to straight f naturals in tunes like The Steampacket, Ewe Reel, Flogging, Banish Misfortune or The Chicago. This can, I think, sound very ugly and out of place while, when used with some judgement and an ear for intonation [listen to Willie Clancy in Bimis ag Ol, Sean Reid’s Fancy [the latter being jig and reel versions of the same melody ofcourse], Banish Misfortune, Connaught Heifers etc etc] they can add greatly to a tune.
. But anyway, I use ABC frequently, and some program has to be used to generate the printable score from ABC, probably one of the Abc2Ps converters if Windows is being used. I use several converters, but don’t recognize the format produced on the Transcription pages. The question remains, which program was use to produce the score? Maybe Barfly? I would not recognize it since I am not of the Mac world. Seems that I recall that Peter is.