I had an idea before Christmas of getting together a collection of tunes in all the common dance forms that are shared by many traditions. The aim is to give beginners a basic musical handle on the style and range of the music from many (Irish, Scottish, English, Manx, Welsh, Breton, Spanish, French,) traditions of tunes that get played in sessions.
Clearly finding tunes or even forms common to the Spanish and Manx traditions is not very likely but if we initially concentrate on the traditions of the Ireland and the UK we should be able to come up with common tunes.
An example that springs to mind is the 9/8 tune “Drops Of Brandy” which is common to all traditions. Another advantage of this tune is that is an iconic form of 9/8 not one of the more interesting variants such as “Kissed Her Under the Coverlet from the NSP tradition”.
In short an Ideal tune would be: -
1 Regularly played at sessions
2 Common to all traditions
3 Iconic
4 Public domain
If we can get a collection of such tunes together we can encourage people to take up the music.
This is not an attempt to tell people what they should play at sessions merely to open a door to allow them to come, play and learn other tunes.
The idea is to get such a collection together and have tunes or sets downloadable in many formats from a website with links to important traditional resources and maybe organise “slow” sessions specifically to help beginners acquire a basic repertoire of tunes, that will allow them to get a foot in the door at other sessions.
I think this is a particularly interesting subject which deserves to be revived. Here in the Isle of Man our traditional music has influences from all of the surrounding countries, although the irish tradition is the strongest, and consequently some of our traditional songs and tunes are very similar to those in the adjecent islands. To give one example, the Manx tune Cum yn Oanrey Cheh is nearly identical to the irish tune The Rakes of Kildare, and also, i’m told, to the shetland tune Da Full-Rigged Ship.
It is astonishing how similar are these tunes in spite of their occurence in such far-flung corners of the gaelic world. Their similarity and originality is such that we can rule out their having developed seperately. The period of separation of these tunes since their original dissemination is probably several hundred years, which makes their similarity even more surprising. We would expect the tunes, like language, to mutate over generations so why have they changed so little? The reason may be due to the small number of holders of the tradition. A particular area might only have one musician, probably a fiddler, who would have inherited his repertoir from his predecessor, perhaps his father, without the tunes changing very much. I have been tempted to write a paper about this subject in the Manx context.
Does anyone know of an online database of similar sounding tunes from different regions, or even an offline source? Personally, I think the value of such a database its intrinsic interest, rather than as an aid to learning tunes for sessions, but it might be relevant to all sorts of things.