Howe's 1,000 Jigs and Reels

Uilleann Pipes
1

Actually it’s, hope you’re ready, Howe’s One Thousand Jigs and Reels: Clog dances, Contra Dances, Fancy Dances, Hornpipes, Strathspeys, Breakdowns, irish Dances, Scotch Dances, &c, &c, for the Violin, Flute,Clarionet, Fife,Flageolet, for any treble instrument. I’ve been having a heap of fun playing through this book on my flute - it’s full of tunes suitable for the amateur musician of yesteryear and today. Lots of these are in A, C, F, Bb, and so forth - good practice! Plenty of those old Irish trad standbys, of course - this book was the predecessor of Ryan’s Mammoth Collection, which was also edited by Pat Sky and published in its reprint by Mel Bay, and if it’s primarily jigsreelshornpipes you want that would be the book to get first - but Howe’s has the real antique stuff to offer. Howe’s is also a total mess - sections of Irish Airs, Ancient Irish Airs, Jigs and Reels, and Contra Dances all contain dance music! - and the overlap with Ryan’s is quite extreme - but I’m very happy to have both books myself.
One lovely bit about Ryan’s was that they were able to use the original typesets or whatever you call it - it was reprinted from the original page, in lovely old-fashioned type, and Howe’s had to be newly written out and typed, with the print in a kind of plain-jane Helveticaish font - but that’s no reason not to snap it up.

Available at http://www.melbay.com and other fine shops.

2

I’m delighted with the plug for Elias Howe’s great book. There are some new tunes in there for the curious, and early documentation for many of the tunes that we are playing today.

Just thought you guys might like to know that I have a complete copy of
“Howe’s Quintuple Musician’s Omnibus” containing ( ARE YOU READY!!!)
6000 TUNES. The chances of getting it published are almost nil.

One point that I would like to make about these old manuscripts is that
Musicians of the 19th century did not seem to pigeonhole music. If it could be played on their instrument then fair play. Notice in the O’Farrell collections that there are duets and minuets on the list. When was the last time you heard a duet in Irish music?

Today if I was to play Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” on the pipes I would be laughed out of the place. Funny how things have changed. What about Dylan’s “Times they are a Changin’; or the National Anthem, etc. Hmmmmmmm!!!

All the best,
Pat Sky

3

Pat, how can you compare the two scenarios? As I understand it, the jigs and reels of the 19th century were considered contemporary, as that type of dancing was still very much the norm, whereas now the tunes are antiques.

I’m sure that will get some people flaming away, trying to justify their favourite oldies, but let’s face it, we are resurrecting tunes from music books 150 years old, and scrambling after recordings of “past masters” to learn how to play it. Our weapon of choice hasn’t changed much in over a hundred years, either.

Some would also say “Both Sides Now” is hardly contemporary. :wink:

djm

4

O’Carolan’s music is older, written for harp and yet is played very nicely on uilleann pipes (at a lot of it does).

5

I’m sure that will get some people flaming away, trying to justify their favourite oldies,

No flaming at all, but really, what needs justification?

6

Its not about justification. I was simply responding to Pat Sky’s note about people today rejecting old hits from the 1960s on UPs versus 150 year old dance music.

djm

7

Ah, but people of a given ethnic background rarely ever knew much about music other than their own, too. No radio, records, and you’d be hard pressed to get more than about 10 miles away from home in one night (the distance you could walk and return home to go to work in the morning).
Of course when most people came to America they abandoned their original folk music, unless there was a need for it, a market, like the Irish in New York - so many Irish kept arriving in the last century, and they all wanted to dance, or have their kids learn dancing or music, that the music kept going. It wasn’t until the 60s that gringos like Pat could play Irish music and not be…I don’t know, laughed at? It just wasn’t done much before. I can think of a few non-Irish who were playing the music before than but it was pretty rare. Denis Brooks, maybe? Standeven. Various guys around New York - the sax or piano players in bands were often “brought in from outside.” Alois Fleischmann and Carl Hardebeck way back when, but they were more like Handel I think. Art musicians taking an interest in folk music.
Howe’s book really seems like a slice of Americana, the mess being part of the appeal. Pat’s Introduction mentions Howe’s Quintuple having Operatic Arias alongside Irish Jigs. Something for all strata of society!
Regarding fashion in music - Joni Mitchell or Dylan were Pat’s examples - Kevin Carr played the pipes in a Grateful Dead tribute band for a while recently. I forget the name, it wasn’t Dead Alive. That’s a horror movie. Re-Dead? Anyway Kevin played a solo, it was really cloudy, and man! Like, when the solo climaxed 14 minutes into it, like, the clouds parted and man! It was like his solo made the clouds go away, man!

8

I was simply responding to Pat Sky’s note about people today rejecting
old hits from the 1960s on UPs versus 150 year old dance music.

A rejection of a 60’s “folk” song vs 150 year old dance music is more likely about taste, style and expectations, rather than how old any given piece may be.

Your juxtaposition of antique vs contemporary brings up pretty interesting issues in a traditional context though.

9

For those interested in 19th Century America and the music environment back then, http://www.blarneystar.com/KittyNew2.pdf has a lengthy history of “Kitty O’Neil’s Champion Jig,” a tune recorded by Tommy Peoples and Kevin Burke, among others, which was named for a dancer of those times, and is in Ryan’s Mammoth Collection.

10

http://www.wakethedead.org/

Jonathan

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:wink: :smiley:

djm

12

Here’s the cover of one of Howe’s dancing manuals, from http://memory.loc.gov.

13

Howe’s book really seems like a slice of Americana

Another one, in a way, is Harding’s collection. I guess it’s about 20-30 years after the Howe collection. It too has a bunch of different versions of common tunes, including funny titles (“Where’s My Other Foot?” & “Watch Out for the Drip” being favorite alternatives to the T-Totalers Fancy). Mixed among the Irish and Scottish tunes are regular American fiddle tunes (Arkansas Traveller) and other strange types I don’t recognize but sound like old Calliope music to me :slight_smile:

14

Today if I was to play Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” on the pipes I would be laughed out of the place.
said Pat.

Well I think (as Eric pointed out) that this does bring up some interesting thoughts. Why, we should ask, are we less tolerant of a slow air “treatment” of a contemporary song? A few thoughts:

It’s not as if we (as 21st century musicians) haven’t been exposed to the reinterpretation of song melodies as an art form: witness Coltrane doing My Favorite Things, for example. And singing itself is about putting one’s own stamp on the tune isn’t it? So why the sniggering?

Once you get past the rather vacuous game of “recognizing” the tune underneath the slow air treatment, what does the listener do with it? Does the welter of personal associations, predjudices against the singer (pro or con), and other baggage prevent them from appreciating it?

We (and here I mean the overwhelming majority of non-Irish speaking pipers; ok: Americans) seem to be quite capable of suspending this sort of predjudice when it comes to slow airs based on sean-nós songs. But wait! we usually haven’t a clue what they’re about, yet we’ve managed to fetishize the singing style and repertoire to the point where their performance engenders a whole set of overly-reverential behaviours (listeners bow their heads; non-Irish speakers trot out shouts of “Ciúnas!” and glare at the punter who dares to continue speaking; children are hushed; mystical connections to never-before-noticed “roots” surface; tears, some genuine, are shed; old geezers decide the pipes are for them etc etc)

In its traditional context (there’s a concept that won’t sit still and be defined!), a slow air can be a keystone to remembering: people hear the tune, remember the song, remember who they heard sing it, and where, and when, and the past is brought into the present. What a gift. Which is why Flatley’s Lord of the Dance (to take an extreme example) is so reprehensible: Anach Cuan is ripped out of any social, personal or historical context and becomes Celtic sonic wallpaper intoned by a cloaked Celtic babe choking on dry ice. If I were to play that in Connemara, chances are there might be an acquaintance of a relative of one of the victims of the drowning listening. One performance points to connection, the other points to nothing.

Yet can’t I level the same criticisms at myself when I play a slow air for a non-Irish audience (go back to the reverential behaviour part)?

So if I play Both Sides Now, I’m simultaneously displaying slow air playing (as a musical style divorced from any context) and allowing the audience access to whatever associations that song may produce (and which they’re more likely to have than for, say, Casadh an tSúgáin). And isn’t that the point?

So I’m curious as to what you all think. What goes through your head when you hear a non-trad. air played? Or when a trad. air is played, for that matter. Replies from pipers in Ireland and Irish speakers especially appreciated: am I imagining things when I suggest that things are that different in Ireland? I seem to remember Harry Bradley touching on this a while back.

15

Since when did limits ever appear in Irish music, song, and dance? People have been doing whatever they want for centuries. And since just about everything has been tried, what would prevent someone from trying more combinations?

16

A few years back Aer Lingus ran some adverts which had a trad version of Cyndi Lauper’s True Colors with trad flute, uilleann pipes, etc. Sounded great. Of course, Phil Collins had to guild the lilly and ruined it. De Dannan did a good cover of Bohemian Rhapsody. I’m pretty sure other respected groups have had some fun with mixing trad and comtemporary music.

17

Perhaps it depends on the circumstances. If we were to be in a Comhaltas competition, as Uilliam mentioned, I think we might very quickly run into the brick wall of what is interpreted as bona fide sean-nós music and what isn’t. And if you’re playing with trad debutants, what is accepted as a trad ballad would be pretty much stratified as well. But if you’re amongst, or playing for, people who wouldn’t know an Irish song from a Balinese gamelan solo, what does it matter?

Would it be fair to suggest that you play what you like, and pick your audience to suit? I’ve always thought CSNY’s “Our House” would sound great on UPs, then follow up with something cheerful like “Both Sides Now”. :slight_smile:

djm