Willie Clancy festival

Trad Irish Music
1

A virtual festival of course. Peter did a nice transcription of Willie Clancy playing “The maid on the green” on an F whistle a while back, which I put up along with the other transcriptions, but somehow neglected to mention it on the board.

Peter has also written biographical notes on Willie that provides some interesting insights.

And to add more fuel to the fire I have just transcribed another piece by Willie, “The floggin’ reel”.

You can find all these items at:

http://www.rogermillington.com/siamsa/brosteve/tunetoc.html

We hope you all enjoy them. As always we’re open to feedback and discussion, and we welcome anyone who can point out little (or maybe big) mistakes we are bound to have made. In fact comments of any kind would be nice… let’s keep the pot boiling.

PS Anyone else is of course free to post transcriptions here.

2

Actually he played a D whislte on the one I transcribed and an F on the one I sent to Steve.

3

Wow, these are great! I can’t wait to get home and play Mary Bergin’s Flogging Reel. I like that ‘rising roll’ thingie, too. I just tried doing it and got a knot in my fingers (my secretary is typing this posts).

Thanks!

4

I went right away and downloaded the Maid On the Green, and was quite surprised at how familiar it sounded. Then I realized that I have a recording of Willie Clancy playing the exact same tune!

My recording of it is on an old LP entitled “Traditional Music of Ireland.” On side one there are a bunch of singers, but on side two it has recordings of Willie Clancy and Denis Murphy playing various tunes. The record cover claims the recording was made on October 23, 1960.

Anyway, I love the transcription of “Maids On the Green,” it’s really great(I haven’t gotten around to the “Flogging Reel” yet). One question I’ve got immediately is about the “turn” that is mentioned. “Turns” are things I’ve heard about a lot lately, but I’m not exactly sure of what they are, though I think I know. Could someone who is qualified elaborate on them a little?

Nate

“Blessed is the man, who having nothing to say, abstains from giving wordy evidence of the fact.”
-George Eliott

[ This Message was edited by: energy on 2002-08-24 00:17 ]

5

The turn is the second part.

I took ‘the Maid on the Green’ from a recording made in august 1972. So, as far as I know this is not the same as the material on the Folkways lps [there were three that had tracks of Willie Clancy and others, mostly recorded at the Fleadh at Ballyheighe Co Kerry, a famous occasion where Clancy, Dennis Murphy and Padraig O Keeffe were together. I borrowed the lps twenty years ago and taped some of the material that interested me at the time, I can’t remember any whistle playing though I did get all of Clancy’s piping]
Could you check if it is exactly the same recording [a friend transferred a lot of my material to CDs, this particular one had about 70 minutes of Willie’s whistle playing from all sorts of sources, although I didn’t spot it there may have been a mix up in the material].

[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2002-08-24 05:06 ]

6

Steve & Peter,
I have been away all summer, so was pleasantly surprised to see the the new forum. Thankyou both for taking the time to post your transcriptions/commentaries - very interesting stuff!!

7

No Peter, it isn’t the exact same recording. It just surprised me to hear it. I haven’t done a detailed comparison of the two recordings but I’m pretty sure that they are different. For one thing, on your recording it sounds like Mr. Clancy chooses a slower tempo. For another, on the my record he plays The Shakescone first and then takes a brief pause before heading into Maid On the Green(which, by the way, is elegantly reffered to as “Name Forgotten” on the LP).

And thanks for the tip about turns. You would think I could have figured out something as simple as that. Ah well; I guess I just wasn’t born with the right genes…

Nate

8

On 2002-08-24 17:57, energy wrote:

And thanks for the tip about turns. You would think I could have figured out something as simple as that. Ah well; I guess I just wasn’t born with the right genes…

Nate

Hey, Nate: If any of this stuff is pass on genetically and cannot be acquired, I don’t want to hear about it. Acquisition is my only hope, since I am about as Irish as Daffy Duck. :roll:

9

Isn’t Daffy Duck related to the McDucks on his mother’s side?

10

Peter,

I enjoyed “The Maid on the Green” very much. Here’s a couple of questions and comments.

I decided that Clancy tapped the notes on the whistle in similar fashion as he did on the pipes, playing a G with the index
finger of the lower hand down and tapping with the two remaining fingers to separate the Gs.
This would effectively mean the separating “cut” is a “bottom D”, which is how I have written it.

I can’t figure out how to play a G on the whistle with the index finger of the lower hand down. Did you mean “ring finger”?

Concerning triplets/quadruplets, you wrote:

… it should be noted here that these
triplet are never three notes of equal length, the first being the longest, the second the shortes and the final one somewhere in between the two
in duration.

That’s quite different from what I hear. For example, in bar 38 the efge group sounds to me like 2 short notes followed by 2 longer notes, something like twice as long as the first two, but not quite. Hence I’d hesitate between e/f/ge, (4efge, and (3efg e, none of these solutions being perfect.

[Actually I think your choice of (3efge is the best: since it does not mean anything in classical notation, it is clearly conventional and nobody can (or at least should) be tempted to play it as written!]

Later on you use the term “inversion”, and I’m not sure I understand what it refers to. Can you please define it?

Finally, you wrote:

He ends the part on a high g but lets the tune flow right over the double bar line into the repeat of the first part, achieving a pleasing sense of syncopation.

Again I’d like to know what you mean by “sense of syncopation”.

Thanks a lot for the transcriptions and the commentaries, I’m learning a lot from them.

Sylvain
PS: I’ve got a list of minor mistakes/typos in the transcriptions. I think I’ll save them and post them all at once to make it easier for you to check.

11

Sylvain,

I noticed the wrong finger bit, you’re right offcourse.

The triplets, I more or lees explained why I made the choice t owrite them the way I did, it’s not perfect but it’s a more or less common practice

I made the inversion up ofcourse, seriously I use in a sense where a [part of] a melodic figure is changed , turned inside out etc eg efge becoming edge, Bee into Bge that sort of thing

send the correction in a pm, we’ll do a bit of editing when Steve comes back, as I said before, after the second Russell transcription I started using half speed soundfiles to work from, which makes life a lot easier and the notations hopefully a bit more accurate.

12

Thanks for the link to Peter’s article about Willie, and thanks to Peter for writing it. I came within weeks of meeting Willie, but to my great regret never did. I joined Na Píobairí Uilleann the Tuesday after a group of people from the club had been down to Miltown for what was to turn out to have been the last time: would that have been the Christmas holidays of 1972?

From the way everyone talked about him, I had come to assume that he had the kind of playful character described in the article, and am glad to have it confirmed. I suspect that hearing him in the flesh would make all the difference because the person comes through the music, much as was also the case with Micho Russell. When I first heard his studio recordings I was a little disappointed because I was used to classical music and there are a lot of rough edges in Willie’s recordings, but before long I came to treasure them.

One of the things implicit in Peter’s article but perhaps not sufficiently emphasised there is the fact that, although he obviously loved what might now be called a slightly deconstructionist approach to tunes and their versions, people who knew him said that he was able to transmit very accurately the tunes which were passed on to him.

Another unsaid is the fact that according to Breandan Breathnach, Willie’s wife didn’t have much respect for his music in his lifetime - probably a combination of small-town respectability and a feeling that the music was distracting him from things, like the job, that she would have regarded as more important. The vignettes in the article suggest a touch of the German romantic novel “Aus dem leben eines Taugenichts” (scenes from the life of a good-for-nothing).

His mischievous way with tune titles also makes it hard to know whether the “respectable” or the “bold” version of a tune title is the original - see Peter’s explanation of the naming of “An Phis Fhliuch” on another thread. The kind of thing I’m talking about is typified by what in polite tunebooks is called “Fasten the legging”, and among practising musicians as “Fasten the leg in her”. Was a title with erotic overtones bowdlerised in the books, with its orginal title going underground, or were perfectly respectable titles given a mischievous twist by the likes of Willie, Micho and the rest of them?

An PluiméirCeolmhar

[ This Message was edited by: Roger O’Keeffe on 2002-09-19 11:49 ]

13

By all accounts Willie made these titles up on the spot.

There’s one story of Willie discussing women and their attitudes with Seamus Ennis, ‘if they don’t like us playign tunes’ he said ‘there’s only one thing we can do, we’ll down tools’ [sticking out his index finger and bending it down, leaving no doubt as to what he meant]

In another story himself and one of his companions were playing music in the kitchen of Friel’s one Chrismas eve. Tom and Maisy Friel went upstairs and left the lads at it. They were sitting by the range, and it being Christmas eve. the turkey was roasting in the oven. As prank, they ate the turkey before they left, leaving the bones in the roasting dish for the Friel’s Christmas dinner.

They did make up for it by bringing in a new turkey the next day.

[ This Message was edited by: Peter Laban on 2002-09-19 13:53 ]