Does anyone happen to have a transcription of Mary Bergin’s track, “Tom Billy’s / Langtern Pony” on Feadoga Stain 1? I’d like to learn her settings of those tunes, but work has been brutal this month and I haven’t had time to sit down and sound it all out. Usually I don’t bother about finding transcriptions but given the album’s popularity I thought it was worth a look. Thanks in advance! Happy to swap you any transcriptions I’ve done.
Some of the tracks from her first recording are in Breandán Breathnach’s 'Ceol Rince na hEireann’ Vol3. I remember Tom Billy’s in there.
She recorded Tom Billy with Ceoltoiri Laighean as well, by the way.
http://www.capeirish.com/webabc/working/source.folders/cre/cre.3/cre.3_tunefolder/207tom_b_J.pdf
Maybe?
The notes to the tunes were available online at some point as well.
If you mean a transcription of her performance (rather than generic sheet music) years ago I was at a festival and I attended a whistle workshop and the teacher (can’t remember his name) handed out transcriptions of a number of Mary Bergin tunes, true transcriptions with all the articulation and breathing and ornamentation fully notated.
I can take a look-see, I might still have those somewhere.
Yes, a transcription of that performance is what I was referring to. It’s pretty spectacular. If you have the time, I’d appreciate if you’d dig that up.
The CRE 3 notatiions were taken from the recording. As played. That was Breathnach’s modus operandi for that volume, to transcribe tunes from easily available recordings for the benefit of learners and improvers.
Cool. Well, I bought the book so we’ll see when it gets here.
I have CR3 in front of me now and the written music falls far short of a transcription, but is more or less the typical ITM generic dots which leave much to the imagination of the player.
When I use the word “transcription” I’m using it in the strict sense of being as complete a rendering of the original performance as is practicable, including slurs (which shows groups of notes played on the same breath without articulation) and articulation (showing which notes are detached with tonguing, and the extent of their detachment) and the points at which breaths are taken.
It’s the very fact that these things are nearly universally missing from ITM “dots” which makes ITM sound so strange when sightread by a “classical” musician. The flaw is not in the musician, but in the notation. He’s reading what’s there; it’s not his fault that the music is written out in such an incomplete way. It’s quite possible to write out ITM more clearly and completely, so that a “classical” musician can sightread it, and it sounds fairly correct. I’ve seen it, one instance being those Mary Bergin transcriptions. There were “classical” fluteplayers in that workshop who could effortlessly read the transcriptions and reproduce all of Mary’s phrasing and articulation and ornamentation- because it was all on the page. Could they be mistaken for “real Irish fluteplayers”? Not at all, but they were pretty darn close being the first time they’d ever played a piece of ITM.
Breandan Breathnach didn’t compile his collections for ‘classical’ musicians. His notations, in the case of CRE 3, were done with the student of Irish music in mind, with a degree of familiarity with the territory and the recordings at hand. The notations show you the notes played and the ornamentation, generally of the first playing on the recording. This should be more than enough to get going with the recording, and a set of ears, as a companion.
The Bergin tutors provide a framework for use of breath, phrasing, the other crunchy bits : the general nuts and bolts stuff as found in her playing.
Protesting that the notations in CRE 3 somehow fall short because they are unsuitable for use by ‘classical’ musicians otherwise unfamiliar with this type of music is downright silly. That is a use they were never intended for.
I’m only after this as a cheat sheet for her exact melody. I can put in her breaths, slurs and inflection easily. I’m just lazy and don’t want to to f*** about on an out-of-tune F whistle to learn her version of the melody. 
No, he is incapable of understanding the conventions of the genre he is attempting to play. Classical music has at least as many un-notated conventions, and any musician who tries to play in an orchestra without knowing them will rapidly come to grief and be seen by his peers as untrained. It’s the same in ITM.
On Friday night I saw MB play with Tony Linnane and Mick Conneely. Which was great as I love Linnane’s fiddle playing. Anyhow, they played the two Tom Billy’s and there were some nice touches on the whistle that weren’t present on the recording. Which only goes to show a notation does nothing more than freeze one performance in time.