Mary Bergin plays the Monaghan Jig on her album “Feadog Stain”. When I listen to it, it sounds like it has four distinct parts, each repeated twice, before the whole thing is repeated. I like that the tune is more complex than the standard two part tune. Why does this one get more parts and are there other tunes you’d recommend that have an unusual structure?
Not familar with that jig, but tunes with 3 or 4 parts are out there. The Lark in the Morning is an example of a tune with 4 parts.
Here’s a slightly different version of the Monaghan Jig:
My favorite slip jig, the Kid on the Mountain, has five parts.
Just for fun I did a quick search of John Chambers site. Monaghan is out there in great profusion…and with lots of wrong key indicators (though usually correct notation. Most are either 3 or 4 parts with the 4th part being added after the 3 parts of the 3 part version usually. There is one setting with 2 parts, and one with 4 parts and then 4 “variation” parts.
I like Frieze Britches which has 5 parts. Some time in the past there was a thread on thesession.org discussing multipart tunes, and quite a few of 5 or 6 or more parts were listed. As the math books say “It is left as and exercise for the reader” to look up that thread 
Yes, The Monaghan has four parts. There are loads and loads of famous jigs with more than two parts - The Gold Ring, The (Other) Gold Ring, The Old Grey Gander, the Geese in the Bog (aka The Lark’s March), The Kilfenora, Doctor O’Neill, The Frieze Breeches (already mentioned), Cherish the Ladies and so on and so on. It’s not unusual.
Mary Bergin follows the recording by Michael Coleman of the Monaghan jig. It has been suggested Coleman added the fourth part. Some, like Séamus Ennis, played a three part version the way it was published in O’Neill’s collection. There is a case to be made the fourth part is, musically, a bit of a Mickey Mouse part, but YMMV.
Patsy Touhey recorded a four part version for Frances O’Neill on an ediphone cylinder. A slightly different take on the tune. The recording can be found here. Can we take from the omission of the fourth part in his collection O’Neill didn’t like it too well?
On a slightly pedantic note: Ben above referred to the Old Grey Gander. The jig is the Old Grey Goose, O’Neill put a lot of stray parts together to make up the long version of this tune. Breandán Breathnach did name a reel the Old Grey Gander, as an obvious play on O’Neill’s title, in honour of Junior Crehan who gave him the tune Gan Ainm.
Sorry Mr G. I kind of know all that, but I can never remember which is which (title, that is - the tunes are no bother ).
Never mind. It’s still pre-coffee for me and I am just spouting trivia floating around my head. The Old Grey Gander is in itself an interesting one as it appears in loads of different versions under different names changing character while using c sharps or c naturals from one version to the next. Lovely reel.
Touhey turns the Monaghan one into a great tour de force with some interesting corners.
Helvic Head. This has five parts and is becoming a pretty popular session tune.
I grew to dislike the Monaghan Jig after being forced to play it at break neck speed by this one particular person who got quite twitchy if he hadn’t managed to get it started every single session. However I have heard it played slower and with more feeling and it’s really nice then. Like a totally different tune which I hardly recognise.
I suppose the way to deal with Mr Impatient would be to start it myself deliberately slowly - however when we tried this he would afterwards go on to demonstrate how it ‘should be played’. Gaaaaaaaaa.
I cannot stand Lark in the Morning. That really is my time to take a comfort break.
Do more jigs than reels have multiple parts?
The Lark in the Morning is in itself not a bad tune but it’s universally hated because we have all heard thousands of poorly played and molested versions.
You may want to try the two part version that came to us from Garret Barry (via Ellen Galvin and Willie Clancy).
[edited to remove link to the tune, ditto for earlier post with link to the Old Grey Gander]
cooo, thanks for that, very pretty, well, it’s ok, it’s still Lark in the Morning though.
This happens when you hear a tune regularly and inevitably thrashed, massacred, trampled on or hanged, drawn and quartered by insensitive and indifferently skilled players, and especially massed ranks of them. Or some subset of the above treatments or conditions.
However, to encourage you, I would say there is a good chance that you will reach a point where you appreciate all those hackneyed chestnuts for what they are - fine old tunes. The aha moment may come when you hear a lovely version by a good player. I avoided Harvest Home like the plague until one day (30 years ago now!) I heard Paddy Killoran’s playing of it.
A good way to give a tune a new lease of life is to try it another key. Lark in the Morning works quite well on the whistle in A, starting on low E. (You won’t need any G sharps but you’ll have to roll the E in the first bar, or substitute something else, to get around the absence of the low C#.) The Mountain Road works much better on whistle in G than the standard D, and Lafferty’s Reel (The Glens of Aherlow) works well when you jack it up a fourth and start on high e.
I was at a session in the US recently where a group of very fine young players were making a point of playing old chestnuts in unusual keys and it was great fun - Lark in the Morning and Silver Spear in G, George Whites’ Favourite in Bm/D, and so on.
Not many people realize that the tune I call “The Water Dog’s Hole” (the Otter’s Holt must be a translation of the Irish by a naturalist) was played by its composer, Junior Crehan in Em/G, not the whistle-and-flute-friendly key of Bm/D popularized by Matt Molloy and the Bothy Band. And it’s lovely in the lower key, too, although it involves a few contortions on the whistle.
Fiddlers of course love to inject new life (and unaccustomed mellowness) into all those run-of-the-mill G tunes by playing them in F - grab your C whistle. (John Carty seems to relish putting Em tunes into Cm - like playing them on a Bb whistle.)
Getting back to the Monaghan jig, the thing that irks me about the tune, apart from the corny fourth part that Coleman may have come up with, tends to come in the very first motif. Much more often than not, it seems, people play it like this:
BGE F2E - with ponderous, nay crushing, emphasis on that irritating long F#. If I hear this I will sit the tune out like a grumpy curmudgeon.
Whereas Mary B, the Kelly brothers, and Tommy Peoples for example all play BGE E3 which bubbles along nicely and doesn’t sound “foreign” to boot.
Loads of multipart reels as well as jigs. It would be interesting to scan the various collections, and some kind of survey of the current popular repertoire, to see whether these long tunes are more frequently jigs than reels. I would guess that they are. Certainly there are lots of “big” jigs in the piping tradition with more than three parts, but I don’t know how often they get played these days, except by soloists.
In addition to those mentioned, a few more long jigs off the top of the head:
The Gold Ring (various settings with varying numbers of parts)
The Maid at the Spinning Wheel (hands up those who can play the first few bars fourth part on command without thinking about it or running through it beforehand)
Langstrom’s “Pony”
The Strayaway Child
Humours of Ballyloughlin etc. etc.
Excuse the rant. Time for me to join Mr G for a virtual first coffee, I think.
Not many people realize that the tune I call “The Water Dog’s Hole” (the Otter’s Holt must be a translation of the Irish by a naturalist) was played by its composer, Junior Crehan in Em/G, not the whistle-and-flute-friendly key of Bm/D popularized by Matt Molloy and the Bothy Band. And it’s lovely in the lower key, too, although it involves a few contortions on the whistle.
Not exactly sure which key Junior originally composed it in although I am pretty sure he based his composition on Paddy Killoran’s Old dudeen, which Killoran played in Bm. He did play it in the Bm version as well though and so did Martin Rochford who must have gotten it off him early on (and in turn passed it on to the Bothies. Keenan, Burke and Molloy were all regular callers at the Rochford house). Martin did play The Mist Covered Mountain in Gm, which is how Junior originally composed it although during the time he had me sit in with ‘the band’ in Gleeson’s during his final years it was always a tone up from that, maybe to suit the rest of us. Same for the Luthrádan which he originally composed in D but I got a G version off him (he may have played that to suit his daughter Ita who was playing the whistle at the time I picked up that). So key0-wise things are never quite straight forward when talking about Junior’s tunes. Bobby Casey played a stunning low version of the Otter’s Holt though.
I don’t particularly share the deep aversion against the BGE F2 in the Monaghan but know many who do. I’ll take it as it comes I suppose. But I love the bubbly E, listen to how Touhey treats them in version I linked, brilliant. Maybe your mind associates it too much with the F in the the other often maltreated chestnut, The Butterfly?
The Maid at the Spinning Wheel (hands up those who can play the first few bars fourth part on command without thinking about it or running through it beforehand)
Yes, well, that’s another part you should have ready when called upon but should omit when given the choice. In some circles you would be evicted for playing the third part of Over the Moor to Maggie as well. another one I can take or leave (including it doesn’t necessarily add to the tune though)
The Frieze Breeches is another long one that I like to play.
Thanks for the background info. on Otter’s Holt/WDH and so on - as you say, things are never quite as cut and dried as we would sometimes like. I don’t think I’ve been associating that F# with The Butterfly, a tune that has never irked me, well not to that extent anyway. I suppose it’s just that the F# in Monaghan Jig seems to bring the tune to a grinding halt before it’s even started.
On the general subject of multipart tunes (for present purposes, those with more than 3 parts), I always feel they hark back to an earlier age of mainly solo playing, and that they must have been developed primarily as a showcase for better musicians. And that the satisfaction to be had with them lies in listening to a skilled solo performer exploring their possibilities. As opposed to a room full of sessioneers grinding out the parts of Old Grey Goose, Humours of Ballyloughlin etc. like so many sausages. 
Well, yes, rolling off a few yards of reels we say around here. Sessions are best taken as a social outlet, not in most cases the most satisfying musical outlet. There can be a great buzz off them if all falls into place though.
There are a lot of multi part tunes in the earliest collections, Helvic Head, The Trip to Killarney etc are from O’Farrell’s but they a distinct from another multi part genre that’s also in the older collections: the tunes ‘with variations’ that nobody seems to play these days (see for example 1001 in O’NDMI).
I wonder though, are we turning into these fellas?
It may be that the longer tunes in O’Farrell’s aren’t always all that distinct from the theme and variation ones. It might be more a matter of how they were written down - if you look at O’Farrell’s Welcome to Limerick, it does seem like it’s a three part jig with a variation of each part… or maybe even a two part tune with several variations on the first part (the 2nd and 5th being so close). It’s obviously not clear from the transcriptions how the things were actually played. Also Yellow Stockings / The Kitten, which picked up an extra two parts between his publications. Theme and variation seems to be fairly popular back in the day, so why wouldn’t these gentleman musicians give the treatment to “folk tunes”?
That said, I both agree and disagree with Steve about playing long tunes in sessions. I think it can be great if you have the right musicians, and bad otherwise… just like all music. But in general it can also be great to listen to how soloists (and duets and trios to some extent) handle the big tunes.
Thanks for the tunes / info / and general theatre criticism ( 
) - it’s always much appreciated by me at least!
Yes, that’s definitely me on the left.
Perhaps we ought to let Mr. A Beaver have his thread back. Meanwhile, will dig out my Pat Sky-produced facsimile copy of O’Farrell’s to discover what you and Nico are on about.
You’ll want both the National Tutor and the Pocket Companion for some of the additional tunes, like Yellow Stockings and O’Farrell’s Welcome to Limerick.
Also while you’re looking, check out The Dusty Miller, Paddy O’Rafferty (I forget how it’s spelled in there), and the Limerick Lasses. The first two for some theme and variation / long tune things, and the last for how similar it is to Seamus Ennis’ Gold Ring (neither the Gold Ring nor the Other Gold Ring, although close enough to the seven parter).