I’m learning this tune. It’s from the French Canadian repertoire but sounds great on the pipes. However, I just can’t play it as a reel. It always comes out as a hornpipe!!
I haven’t tried it on pipes yet, but I play it on whistle. I usually play it with Old Time players and they like it just a little faster than I would play a reel. I will try it as a hornpipe and see what it sounds like. I think hornpipes aren’t played enough. I love their “bounce”.
Old time players usually play tunes too fast (IMHO) and when I play a hornpipe at hornpipe speed (such as fisherman’s hornpipe), they are enthralled with it and can sometimes remember others that played some hornpipes at the right speed.
They are amazed at Soldier’s Joy played as a hornpipe and lots of them don’t recognise the tune.
I agree with Fancypiper, hornpipes are a blast to play and an excellent way to practice staccato style, not to mention maybe a little backstitching. I like Alexanders, Boys of Bluehill, Harvest Home, and Off To California.
Hmm.. I seems I can’t play it as a hornpipe and I can’t seem to “Irishify” it without some work on it. I can “swing” it more, but that doesn’t make it sound like a hornpipe, my playing makes it sound more like a slow reel than a hornpipe.
Where do you put the triplets/tight triplets?
Depends wot ye are calling Hornpipe speed?180 is the tempo wi Reels at 224 so it is not far behind a reel.Playing the Hornpipe slow and lazy like they do these days has crept in over the past few decades.50 years ago ye would have been laughed at.
In my experience it is the older players who DO NOT speed along as tho they hate the tune and want to finish it as soon as possible but the younger" look at how good I am "plonks…
St.Annes is not a difficult reel.I have heard it in a song version which may be the Canadian version and that is terrible.(Well the couple that were singing it were terrible)
Ye don’t have to put triplets into every tune its an ornament if ye want to use it go ahead if not don’t.
ye could amend the 1st bar to start wi a D instead o the F followed by E then GFE triplet then D
Uilliam
It certainly has a hornpipe-ish feel to me. Lovely tune though.
Doc
To me, a hornpipe is defined more by the rhythm than by the speed. A strong down beat and a more subtle back beat.
It is misleading to state that a hornpipe tempo is 180, and that of a reel is 224, as Uilliam does, as half of these beats are, as PJ indicates, backbeats.
Uilliam’s numbers should at least be devided by two, to be ‘correct’. Monsieur Flatley might be able to tap his toes at Uilliam’s figures, but even he would find it difficult to DANCE at that tempo. The leading foot steps one quarter of Uilliam’s numbers, and on the second the left foot moves and steps the next quarter, and so on, on the back beat.
See what I am getting at - the beat is on the leading foot, so devide Uilliams figuires by 2. So, when playing either a hornpipe or reel, you are putting the beat on the left, or leading foot, only. Thats what makes them dances, and not marches.
Pwt
Absolute twaddle.Have ye listened to the old hornpipes?Well have ye?
If they are playing at 90bpm then I am seriously in need of new hearing aids and ye are havin a larf or taking the pish..
Those of ye that have read these posts afore will know that they are not made up figures by me but are frae Ceol Rince na hEireann.Book 1.Breandan Breathnach.pge ix.
Now if he wanted it to be absolutely clear he would have written 90 ,that would be logical but he didnae cos it is bollocks.
The style of dancing we have today and that is why I said it has changed in the last 50 years is dramatic.
Starting wi the Belfast Hop in the 1950’s when the old style of dancing close to the floor was abandoned …in favour of the high kick etc..
The Northern style of dancing of old used to adjust the reel steps for the hornpipe.That is not suggesting to me a much slower version and given they are both in 4/4 time 180 makes sense.
The Dancing Foot would of course take note of the beat and join in with the rythm.
Until the early 19Cce The jig reel and hornpipe was interchangeable.The Hornpipe is an English Dance introduced in about 1760.
My Mother who was a champion Irish Dancer in the 1930s and who danced for Leo Rowesome and .Prof.O’Meally told me when I started aff and she heard me play a modern hornpipe that it was way to slow…
Here is a picture of my Grandads band
Thats me Grandad 2nd left thats me mothers trophies at the bottom left and that is my Uncle wi the clarinet.The band played every Saturday night on Radio Athlone and he would not play hornpipes as ye describe..
Still further reference if ye like.
"The late Tony McNulty,who trained as as a dancer in the 1940’s.says that "hornpipes are now at a snail’s pace to put in lots of double trebles"This extremely ornamented style in which the impulse seems to be to,as it were,defy the time signature and over -embellish each bar of the music in order to impress an adjudicator has become an embarrassment to An Coimisiún le Rinci Gaelacha…the governing body of the modern dancing schools.Lately,the Coimisiún has instructed the dancing schools to alter the speed of the music used by its dancers so as to restore it somewhat to the original faster traditional speed."
The Story of Irish dance.Helen Brennan.Pge153.
Now then I am sorry to destroy your cosy wee world of makebelieve but that is how it was.That is how my mother remembers it and that is good enough for me.I even hear the hornpipe being described as slow and sexy ,usually by my friend when he is in his cups wi the scotch and Guiness, and worse people listen to him so it becomes an established fact over time…Perleeez gi us a break slow and sexy my aerse.
Go and listen to some great hornpipes .Tommy Kearney.Leo Rowesome.Sean McAloon et al…then tell me they are not playing at 180 and that I am wrang..Go on then…what are ye waiting for…
This is precisely the sort of thing I was alluding to in another post as a reason why some folks give up on this forum .Ye give a bit of advice ,“oh thanks for triplets Uilliam..” Pog Math Thoin, and then ye get chewed by some half cocked argument on something which was around long before ye came on the scene.Why bother.
Yoo hoo Peter any room at the virtual inn of peace and tranquility awa frae thes numpties.? 
Slán Agat
Uilliam
'liam and pwt…
you’re both right :cough:
To be more precise, Breathnach gives the tempo of hornpipes and reels in terms of the length of the crotchet, at 180 and 224 respectively.
However, not every crotchet in a reel or hornpipe corresponds to a downbeat, as Pipewort points out. Certainly with reels I think you will agree that you do not tap your foot 224 times per minute. I, for one, do not tap give four equal taps of my foot in a hornpipe - at most I give a strong downbeat to the “first and third crotchet” in a hornpipe, and a weaker beat (which you may think of as the upbeat if you like) on the second and fourth crotchet… some players tap their opposite foot, lightly, to this weaker beat.
This is a key point for those who haven’t been immersed in listening to these tunes for life; neither reels nor hornpipes have four “even” beats per bar, despite the way they are frequently written. Breathnach surely does not mean to infer that there are actually four downbeats per bar either, he presumably uses the crotchet as a convenient “unit” with which to compare the relative tempos of various types of dance tunes. He could just as easily have written a “half note” in place of the crotchet and indicated tempos of 80 and 112 bpm, respectively.
Bill
Some people actually do, but they use both feet. One pat of one foot for each beat. One for the downbeat, the other for the back beat.
Two examples that spring to my mind are Jerry O’Sullivan and Micho Russell. 
I’m a recent convert to the hornpipe. I don’t think I could play at the speed that Uilliam suggests. I’m not saying that Uilliam’s wrong. It’s just that if I tried, I’d probably just be blasting out notes with none of the ornamentation that I enjoy putting into tunes.
Maybe that’s why I like St Anne’s Reel: like hornpipes, there’s a lot you can do with it. The G# in the 2nd part is just plain evil to begin 
but is very satisfying to play once the reflex kicks in.
I have heard over the years that:
-Hornpipes came to Ireland from Scotland and
-They were once not in an even-numbered signature but in some unit of 3 (!)
Please inform.
T
A piper once suggest that I try playing a hornpipe in 12/8.
That is what I refer to in the next sentence of the post you quoted above… I didn’t mean to imply that the “double tap”/alternating feet approach only works for hornpipes. The important point is that the alternating beats are secondary to the “downbeat” (and these alternating taps are not equally spaced). The relative length of those subdivisions (down-and-up beats) determines to a large extent the “swing” in the rhythm.
Regarding the origins of hornpipes, I think there is a near-consensus that the hornpipe form was imported into Ireland. However I have also heard it suggested, and I tend to agree, that many tunes that are now played as hornpipes started out as “single jigs”, which were probably once much more common than they are today.
(by single jig I don’t mean “(double) jig played singly”, but refer to tunes such as Clancy’s Single, The Fowler On The Moor, Pat Ward’s Jig, etc… ever wonder why “Pat Ward’s Jig” doesn’t sound like a “jig”? That’s why…)
I think that 12/8, which is a triple metre such as TK asks about, is every bit as good for transcribing hornpipes as 4/4 or 2/2… but either way, the transcription is a “shorthand” rather than a mathematically literal division of the bar into equal parts. One “just knows” that the quavers in a hornpipe are not of equal duration even though they may be written that way. Much ink has been spilled regarding which notation is “correct”, but frankly I think they are all more or less equally appropriate if one does not take them literally - and all equally “wrong” if one does.
Bill
The Stage Hornpipe is in the high dance category with light hopping and skipping movements and akin to Scottish Stepping.The step dance by contrast as performed by the beating out of the rhythm wi the feet is the hornpipe as generally accepted as English and an import.In many areas of Britain eg Lancs.Cumbria.Norfolk Suffolk Devon Western Isles and the east coast of Scotland all have steps similar or identical to the Irish Hornpipe.It could be argued that the immigrant workers took the steps to these places or vice versa.But because of the wide variety of places involved it is the latter view which prevails.
The 1st Ceili incidentally was held in London in the Bloomsbury Halls on 30 October 1897.The newly devised dances were performed by lines of boys and girls.This was innovative and came about because when the Irish went to Scottish Ceilidhe the found to their dismay that the
Scots had far more dances to enjoy than they did to be exact the Irish didnae have a single group set dance..Necessity is the mother of invention and the modern sets were born.Much to the dismay of the purists..
BTW John O’Donovan the expert dancer is quoted as saying.."the music,particularly the hornpipe,is slowed down so much to accommodate the intricacies and extra taps,that the traditional musician is no longer happy to play for modern dancers**…“Traditional Dancing Today 1983”**
So even he was commenting on the dissapearance of the traditional hornpipe as late as 1983.It has moved on of course wi the Jigs being played at reel speed and the reels being played at Jig speed.Theres progress for ye.If that is the modern contribution to the traditon then God help us.
Slán Agat
Uilliam