Tunes that start in the 2nd octave

Whistle
1

Reading a recent topic about “bouncy” tunes got me to thinking about a tune that I’d classify as bouncy, Cliffs of Moher.

More interesting to me though is it is the first tune that I’ve learned where it starts in the 2nd octave. I love it. When I first heard it I thought, “How cool is that!” Going 2nd octave first I think gives it such a burst of energy right out of the gate.

Can anyone suggest other tunes that start with the 2nd octave. And exactly how common is it? I’ve been playing for almost a year now golly! :astonished: and this is the first one I remember coming across.

2

Blackthorn Stick, Planxty Irwin, Glass of Beer and I’m sure there will be lots more

3

Banish Misfortune, Sailor’s Hornpipe, Si Beag Si Mhor, The Dublin Reel…

4

Most old time tunes have the A part starting in the octave.

I have often wondered why Irish tunes mostly start in the low octave and the B part in the high and the old time tunes are reversed except for the cross over tunes such as Fisherman’s Hornpipe and Hop High Ladies (Miss Mccloud’s reel).

5

The Blackthorn Stick jig that I play starts in the low octave.

Are you talking about the reel?

6

I’m talking about this one: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4AsiVNwDLLQ

7

The B section in ITM is not only the musical contrast of the A but also the climax and denouement. As such it’s easier to build “up” rather than build “down”. Obviously there are plenty of exceptions to this formula.

8

Hmm.. a jig, but I don’t think that I have heard it before.

I learned the jig that Tommy Reck plays on his Stone in the Field album.

9

Wow, that’s really awful.

10

The Blackthorn Stick that I know starts on middle D, so I guess that’s second octive.
And if I remember correctly, at least one of the versions of St. Anne’s Reel starts in the second octive.

11

I learned Calliope House with the B-part (high) first, so whenever we play it with people outside our two usual session crowds, we yell “Calliope B-first” during the set. Creates some confusion, but oh well.
Others that come to mind are The High Reel and The Skylark.
Mike

12

One fairly obvious tune that springs to mind is the Belfast Hornpipe. It starts off with a really good run down, mostly in arpeggio(?), from the second octave A right down to bottom D and back up part of the way.
A great tune as a finger agility exercise!

13

Hi
I’m learning a reel ‘The Skylark’, it starts on an ‘A’ in the second octave,and like the Belfast Hornpipe goes right down to low d by the middle of the second bar.

Cheers

14

Dennis Murphy’s Polka and The Rose Tree

15

Here are some numbers, culled from several collections, of tunes beginning in the 2nd whistle octave (ignoring pick-ups):

Mally’s 100 Essential: 27/100 = 27%
Mally’s 100 Enduring: 23/100 = 23%
Norbeck Reels: 201/822 = 25%
Norbeck Jigs: 103/386 = 27%
Norbeck Hornpipes: 16/105 = 15%

By these counts, that’s roughly 25%, or 1 out of 4 tunes.

Here’s another perspective. The basic range of ITM tunes (with fiddle tunes included) is 17 diatonic notes from G below the the treble staff to b above the staff. Of those, the whistle’s 2nd octave comprises 6 [defgab] of those notes, or 6/17 = 35%.

So, in a random distribution you might expect that 35% of the tunes would begin in the second octave. The fact that it’s actually 25% means that the tunes are only slightly weighted (by 10%) toward the 1st octave or below.

In any case, look through any general ITM tune collection and you’ll find that 25%. If the tunes you know are all 1st octave starters, it just means that your repertoire isn’t completely representative.

Tunes that begin on high g or above are rarer still - around 5% by my count. But there are a few well-known ones, including (some already mentioned):

The Blackthorn Stick
Tom Billy’s Jig
The Coolea Jig
Maid on the Green
Gillian’s Apples
Boys of the Town
Larry O’Gaff

The High Reel
Connemara Stocking
Dublin Reel
Reel of Mullinavat
The Skylark
Swinging on a Gate
The Primrose Lass
Fox on the Town
The Mason’s Apron

Stack of Barley
Belfast (Sweep’s) Hornpipe

FWIW, I think that the starting note isn’t a very useful measure of a tune’s character. The tensions created by the rise and fall of the melodic contour are more subtle than that. It’s more entire phrases that go or stay high or low, or sweep dramatically between the two, that can give a tune its personality.

But sometimes it’s fun to look at statistics like this anyway. :slight_smile:

16

Interesting! What program are you using to generating these stats or are you using a Perl script?

I think it would be kind of useful to get a frequency distribution for each note played in the ITM repertoire, from (G,) to (d,) to justify getting certain keys on the flute (low C, low C#, Eb, Fnat long, Fnat short, G#, Bb and Cnat) given that each of these keys can cost hundreds of dollars each.

17

You bring up an interesting point.
Mrs MacLeod of Raasay (the Scottish Highland reel, perhaps the original) starts on the high part. The Irish version (McCloud’s reel) I learned reversed the order of the parts. The old-time version I’ve heard (Hop High Ladies) retains the (original?) Scottish order.

18

This has been treated at length in Traditional Music In Ireland by Tomas O Canainn.
The section headed “note frequency” begins:
“There is a tendency in much of the dance music to concentrate on only a few notes of the available scale, and to return to these again and again throughout the tune. The result, far from being boring- as it could be in the hands of an inexpert player- is a tune which attains a unity of purpose and a build-up of tension eminently satisying or both the first-class performer and the discriminating listener.”
Later he continues:
"All this leads to a method for assessing the relative importance of notes in a tune, based on the following criteria:

  1. a tone-frequency count giving a point for each appearance of the note
  2. the addition of a further point (a) to a note which occurs on a strong beat, (b) to the highest note on its first appearance, (c) to the lowest note on its first appearance, (d) to a note proceeded to by a leap greater than a fifth, (e) to the first stressed note, (f) to a long notes."
    (He then applies these formulae to the jig Cailleach an Airgid.)
    “This gives the interesting reslut that the most important note in the tune is A… and the next in importance is D…This differs from the tonality that one would deduce from an analysis of either the key signature or final note of the tune, and if one calls the most frequently occurring note the tonic and the next most frequently occurring note the dominant, one is led to conclude that this tune has complex tonality, with a tonic A and dominant D.”

I hardly need to state that this theory is open to question, for one reason that in music there is no connexion between a note’s frequency and its place in the scale or its harmonic role. The author is openly re-defining the concepts of “tonic” and “dominant”.

In Folk Music and Dances of Ireland Breandan Breathnach uses a more conventional approach to the topic of modes in Irish music. He states that over 60% of traditional Irish music is in the “Doh mode”, in other words, a normal Major scale.

Both authors couch their discussion of scales and modes in terms of a D uilleann chanter, whistle, or flute. C and F are the notes most often “inflected” (Breathnach’s term for a note’s propensity to switch between natural and sharp).

The discussion of which whistle keys are useful to have at sessions has been covered in several threads. At sessions I use D for the vast majority of tunes, and also need E, A, C, and G for a few tunes each.

19

That’s interesting, although you take the fact that the high octave is underweighted and comprises only a third of the normal range and the result is that most tunes start in the first octave. It’s also my impression (although this certainly varies by session) that the weighting is even heavier for the most commonly played tunes. It says something that the “High Reel” is called that because having a reel start high is so unusual!

Boys of the Town

Confusing, since I always think of the “other” Boys of the Town that starts on the low D:

http://irishflute.podbean.com/2007/04/30/the-boys-of-the-town/

A marvelous version of this appears on the Wooden Flute Obsession CD, btw. I don’t think I’ve ever heard the high version. Offhand, can you think of a recording or source to listen to it?

20

http://www.thesession.org/tunes/display/3963