I’ve been playing through some of the tunes in Peter Barnes’ big collection of English country dances. It’s an enjoyable way to work on accidentals and keys other than D, at least as far as I can manage half-holing and a few new fingerings. I especially like the tunes that shade a bit toward the baroque (a number of them attributed to Purcell).
For anyone out there familiar with this music, is there a preferable way of handling the articulations–more tonguing than in ITM, for example?
Thanks.
I’m hoping to get a lesson or two on this soon.
I’ve talked a little about it with one teacher. According to this person, articulation is pretty much tonguing, the standard Irish cuts, taps, and rolls, aren’t used much if at all. The more classical grace notes might be used. As he said, in a sense it’s quite difficult since it’s virtually all in the phrasing, very little in the ornamentation.
The Baltimore Consort did an album of Playford tunes; you might want to get that for Chris Norman’s take on English country dances.
Hmm. Here’s one place where the great divide between ‘traditional’ musicians and ‘conservatory’ musicians is very clear*.
To trad musicians, of course these tunes must have had a substantial repertoire of ornament and variation–play 16 bars of music 6 or 8 (or more) times each for dancers and musicians will get bored and start mixing stuff up to keep themselves amused.
However, that’s not how classical musicians are trained to think. They’re trained to play what’s on the page and nothing but.
Unfortunately, the Playford-era corpus seems to be in the ‘posession’ of early (or baroque) music departments rather than trad musicians.
I once asked this question on a playford tune mailing list, and the answers I got were all on the order of “First, start with a really good score…” I didn’t play from a score at all; clearly that approach wasn’t going to help me.
However, there doesn’t seem to be any extant evidence about what was in fact going on at the time, so my advise would seem to be “play what sounds good if the dancers keep going, it’s working.”
~~
A similar discussion I read recently about style in ‘english’ trad fiddle music posited that while much of the recorded ‘source’ repertoire is sparsely ornamented, the fact is that much of these were recordings of very old musicians, many of whom hadn’t been playing much in the years before they were recorded–the recordings get the tunes correctly but don’t represent the flower of tradition in bloom.
One or two of these are clearly working it a lot more, and they use a pallatte of techniques not unlike those in Irish music.
\
You can’t go wrong listening to any of the albums by Bare Necessitiesand picking up their style, but you probably know that already.
Carol
I’ve played with Peter Barnes on occasion (he lived just down the road from me when I was living in Lincoln, Massachusetts) so I can say with authority that he uses tonguing for articulation. He was mostly playing silver flute for the English country dance tunes, although I occasionally saw him play his keyed Olwell. He uses the Olwell more in the contradance bands, especially for Irish tunes. Peter is also a brilliant piano player as well as flutist, a really gifted guy and a fine human being.
I realized that my post of last night was very poorly worded and didn’t really say what I meant. I was thinking of articulation simply in terms of separating notes, and meant that Irish-style cuts, taps, etc., weren’t used as rhythmic articulation. Simon’s absolutely right that the playing will be ornamented and that variations are very important – a lot of the tunes are very short and would need to be played through many times to last even a minute, and they’d be boring as hell played straight without any variation.