I heard Liam O,Flynn remark a couple of times that he regularly goes through O,Neill,s 1001 looking for new tunes and at the concert in Killorglin there recently he played a hornpipe that he got in that very manner ,the tune was “the homors of castle bernard” he even reserched it and had a bit of a story to go with it !!!
I dont read music myself and I suppose it would be an advanage to read music for the purpose of find good new pipe tunes.
RORY
Good for Liam Og.
Tommy Keane taught this favourite old Seamus Ennis tune at Willie Week two years ago.
BUT it is a great way, leafing through manuscript. singing all the while for a tune that appeals, and that has not been heard for a while.
IMHO, that is how the great and the good do the buisness on their CDs. They revive tunes, and or rework them; AND GIVE THEM LIFE.
PWT
O’Neill’s is available on-line in a number of formats for free. If you can’t read standard music notation, can you read ABC? Even if you can’t read ABC, there are also many sites that include a MIDI version that you can learn by ear.
Here’s some examples:
JC’s](http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/book/oneills/%22%3EJC%27s) On-Line - all ABCs
djm
As tunebooks go, my favorite for picking out new piping tunes (or just being reminded of once-familiar ones!) is Ceol Rince na hEireann volume I, otherwise known as “CRE 1”. The vast number of tunes in there are pipe-friendly, and in great settings. (Tune names are in Irish but the English titles appear in the index, for the gailge-challenged[*] like myself).
Books like Hugh Sheilds’ Tunes of the Munster Pipers are great, but the settings and tunes differ from the common modern repertoire. Sometimes that’s just what you want, to breathe new life into an old tune, or discover obscure old tunes, but if you want settings that are known by more people, CRE I is probably your better choice.
Bill
[*] how do you say that os gailge anyhow?[/size]
Tà ceal gaeilge orm (?)
I dont read music myself and I suppose it would be an advanage to read music for the purpose of find good new pipe tunes.
Learn, you’ll be suprised how easy it is.
But, buy some kind of recording device and sight read/play loads of tunes and then listen back to them. You’ll get a different perspective then.
Ceol Rince na hEireann volume I
Every tune in this book is a gem!!!
My 2nd favourite in the CRE series is Vol 4.
Look in the list of contributors and pick the tunes from Jack Wade.
They are great tunes!!! A lot from the Fingal area (as am I) of North County Dublin.
Some nice ones from the Gunn family from Fermanagh too.
Tommy
P.S.
English translations of the notes of all 5 books!!
Yes, ALL of the CRÉ books are worth getting. I’m trying to remember…was it vol. 4 or 5 that had an abundance of Sliabh Luachra tunes in it?
A while ago, I was corresponding with Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh who was telling me about a bunch of Denis Murphy tunes he learned from a tape made by Breandan Breathnach. (One of these tunes can be heard in the TG 4 'Sé Mo Laoch program on Tony McMahon and is an absolutely sick muthaf*cka of a tune). Caoimhín said that Breandan taped the tunes with the intention of publishing them, but never got around to it. From what I gather, a number of the tunes that he collected have still never been published…Wonder if there’d be enough to cobble together a Vol. 6…?
And that’s a good thing? Those Denis’s words?
Our own Ken Ricketts can be heard playing the Humours of Castle Bernard in the Clips and Snips, very well too. I first heard the tune played by the Dublin Meropolitan Garda Band on an old 78 which was reissued on LP in the 80s. The humorous (humourous?) thing about this tune is that it was first printed in Ryan’s Mammoth Collection as Bernardo’s Hornpipe; O’Neill swiped the tune for his own books, along with the not-so-subtle title change.
There are lots of commonplace fiddle or session tunes that are fine piping tunes, but you don’t hear pipers play on their own much, like Sweeney’s Dream. Plenty of those in CRE I like Bill says. Another one from that book I’m very fond of is the Leitrim Reel, which I got from a dub of an old acetate - never heard anyone play it in modern times.
This past summer at Irish Week at the Augusta Heritage Center (Davis and Elkins College, Elkins, West Virginia), I noticed that some faculty members of the college there are publishing on CD all of the tunes in O’Neill’s. At the present time, I think they’ve released only one or two volumes.