OK, so Viola is a rare beast in IrTrad, not a usual staple in the average session, but a friend of mine has a 9 year old daughter learning Viola. Not a musical family…most of the family mojo is devoted to her 11 year-old brother’s hockey activities, and, sadly, while the parents are good friends, I was saddend to see the “family update” letter in their Christmas card actually make fun of her efforts to play the instrument. Sigh.
So when I next visit them I’d like to take a few simple jigs n reels n stuff and try them out with her, either viola and fiddle and/or viola and D whistle, but more to try to encourage her in her efforts and maybe give her a musical perspctive that she’s not getting from her current teachers/enviornment.
I hear that viola is not treble clef. All of the tunes in Moon and Norbeck and all I’ve seen in IrTrad as a whole is treble clef. If I wanted to get some sheet music together for some easy jigs and reels that this young student could read and understand, any ideas of how I would do it?
I don’t have any suggestions in regards to the sheet music issue, though I assume she will be able to read the treble cleff just fine.
However, you may want to get her a copy of Kevin Crawford’s “In Good Company”… Martin Hayes plays a couple tunes on viola along with Kevin on Bb flute.
Chris
Hi Dazed,
Am I correct in thinking that a viola’s strings are tuned C G D A ? My dad plays viola, but not for IRTrad music…
If so, I can see four possible ways forward.
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Find some tunes that don’t employ the E string on the fiddle - i.e. just the bottom 3 strings, which are the same as the top 3 strings of the viola, and then if needs be transcribe them to viola score, or just play them by ear.
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Play the tunes as normal, i.e. play the fiddle tunes on the viola, and accompany on a Low G whistle. So you’re using the viola as a transposing instrument. If needs be, again re-transcribe the tunes into a readable score for a viola.
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I believe some banjos are tunes C G D A, so maybe there are tunes & scores already in existence that would transfer directly to a viola. You should check this out on with some banjoists.
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Get her a violin, and say it’s a baby viola.
I feel for the girl if the family are not behind her in her musical efforts!
Yep, viola is tuned C G D A, one fifth lower than a violin. Classical sheet music - and probably every method book is written in an Alto Clef. It looks kind of like a big letter B. The middle line of the staff, at the center of the B, is middle C. She is undoubtedly learning to read only music written in that form if she’s still early in the process.
If you have a tune collection in ABC format, you can probably transpose whistle tunes down a full octave, there’s got to be a way to specify this clef in the ABC tune headers.
John Chambers’ ABC pages have some mention of clefs. http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/doc/ABCtut_Clefs.html
Thing is, it’s likely going to be a little trouble on your, or anyone’s part to prepare some ITM sheet music for viola.
My daughter has been taking violin for a year. She first played in A and D, only recently starting to play in G. Go to a music shop and take a peek at a viola method book and see what keys they start in.
A tenor banjo is tuned the same way as a viola, but how is the music normally written? Trebble or alto clef?
It really is a nice sounding instrument. Just not super-popular now.
Actually, if you knew what clef to use (violas are alto clef, perhaps? suppose I could find out at orchestra rehearsal tomorrow) it would be trivial to prepare ITM sheet music – any decent ABC program could do it.
And are you sure tenor banjo isn’t usually tuned the same as a violin? Either that or my banjo-playing friends here are freaks…
I agree that a little work with some decent ABC software will do the trick nicely.
I’m not sure about anything with regard to banjos. I surfed over to http://www.juststrings.com and found that a banjo is tuned G D G B D and a tenor banjo isn’t mentioned. Sorta violinish for the first two strings, at least.
http://www.daddario.com lists one string set for a tenor banjo and they list the tuning as C G B A which is close to C G D A, but not quite, unless they have a typo.
http://www.tenorguitar.com claims both the tenor guitar and tenor banjo are CGDA.
AAARGH!!! 
Thanks for the info…but geesh, this must be why you see so few violas at sessions. All I want to do is find a way to encourage this poor girl’s musicianship, but if its this tough thats too bad cause I dont live in the same city and state as they do so I can drop by frequenetly to nurture her along.
Transposing…hmmm that would be a challenge for me, Im not sure how to go about doing that.
Geee, what a cool wierd thing…I wish there was an Irish Tune book for Viola.
Irish tenor banjos are indeed tuned like fiddles.
Normally tenor banjo is tuned to CGDA but Irish tenor banjo players like to put on heavier strings and tune to GDAE.
Chris
Its simpler than I expected. I took a miscellaneous file of ABCD tunes and added the following line after the K: line in the header of each tune
V:1 clef=alto name=“Viola”
ran it through the abc2ps processor, and voila! sheet music for the viola!
You could find a couple of tunes you like from the tunefinder at http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html, then run them through the tune-o-tron at http://www.concertina.net/tunes_convert.html to generate either GIF or PDF files. Piece o’ cake.
[ This Message was edited by: rosenlof on 2003-01-28 18:27 ]