Just thinking about trad tunes that might span a couple of octaves in a short space of time. Loads of hornpipes - The Poppy Leaf, for instance, with its broken arpeggios - The Legacy (reel) which spans more than two octaves, a few Reavy tunes (if you count them as traditional) … Sean Ryan’s (reel). Flicking through O’Neiil’s it doesn’t seem to be all that common, so maybe it’s a more modern thing. But there’s still plenty of fairly big spans, and even leaps, in such tunes as Miss MacDonald’s, Cahill’s Courtship, I Have No money, McFadden’s Mishap (a full two octaves is less notes than in Ashokan Farewell) and a few hornpipes. And I haven’t started on the airs …
OK, OK, I’ll back off on the commonly used range part.But only because its an air. Most tunes talked about here are dance tunes (D-b) or song tunes (usually a lot less than and octave and a seventh - get a group of people round a campfire singing what denny linked and the many of them will have to be good at folding octaves)
But do you play any other trad-ish tunes with that big a range in consecutive notes.
[rats, crossing and you already answered the question]
Ha, OK
Thanks for the examples. Yes, I see that its a hornpipey sort of thing to do.
Yeah, when I started thinking about it, I was surprised both at how many older tunes had those wide pitch ranges within a short space of time, and also at how many of the more ‘modern’ tunes seem to do it. There definitely seem to be more modern tunes with these wide arpeggios passages. But still, it was evidently always there in the music. Which I didn’t know before, because I’d never thought about it …
… so thanks David!
