Fall 2005
ARTICLES
COLUMNS
- The Practicing Fiddler: A Conversation with Rob Thomas, by Hollis Taylor
- Fiddle Tune History: Ryan's Mammoth Collection, by Andrew Kuntz
- Cross-Tuning Workshop, Part Twenty-eight: EBEB/GDGD, by Jody Stecher
- On Improvisation: How to Play in a Pick-up Band, by Paul Anastasio
- Bluegrass Fiddling: Benny Martin Plays a Breakdown, by Paul Shelasky
- Practical Hints on Irish Fiddling: On Intentions and Outcomes, by Brendan Taaffe
- Accompanying Traditional Fiddle Music: Harmonizing the Modes, Part 2, by Mark Simos
- Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour: Manitoba's Andy deJarlis, by Gordon Stobbe
- Reviews of recordings, DVDs, and books
- In Memoriam: Forrest Rose
TUNES
- Invercald's Reel (Robert Burns and Scots Fiddling)
- A Rose bud by my early walk (Robert Burns and Scots Fiddling)
- Old Joe Clark (six levels! plus accompanying chord chart)
- President Garfield's (Ryan's Mammoth Collection, Fiddle Tune History)
- President Grant's Hornpipe (Ryan's Mammoth Collection, Fiddle Tune History)
- General Longstreet's (Ryan's Mammoth Collection, Fiddle Tune History)
- Wade Hampton's Hornpipe (Ryan's Mammoth Collection, Fiddle Tune History)
- Suwannee River Hoedown (GDGD, Cross-Tuning Workshop)
- Katy Hill ( Bluegrass Fiddling)
- Lady on the Island (Irish Fiddling)
- Jenny Picking Cockles (Accompanying Traditional Fiddle Music)
- Early Settlers' Breakdown (Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour)
ARTICLE EXCERPTS
 Photo: Don Pedro Dimas plucks strings during a tune at the cemetery during Day of the Dead. (Zaidee Stavely)
Playing Music to the Scent of Marigolds: The Day of the Dead in Michoacán
By Zaidee Stavely
The women sit quietly in the dark, rearranging their shawls around their shoulders, whispering and laughing and moving closer to the warmth of the candles on the graves. The flowers arranged in tin cans and glass jars behind them graze their heads and arms. All around them, the scent of cempoazúchil, or marigolds, hangs in the air, sweet and musky. The graves are covered with petals, flowers, fruit, bread, candles and photographs. Another woman approaches, coming to pay respects to her mother after spending most of the night watching over her in-laws’ tombs. The others greet her, smiling in the cold. It is close to morning.
This is Day of the Dead in Tzintzuntzan, in the state of Michoacán, Mexico. The women are not in mourning, but rather, in remembrance, keeping watch. All day families have been arriving at the graveyard, come to decorate their relatives’ resting places and spend time with cousins, nephews, grandchildren, aunts and uncles far-removed. Some of the graves are decorated with elaborate arches covered in flowers and fruits; others bare simple glass jars filled with long red amaryllis flowers or carnations among the cempoazúchil, and candles. But there is no stone left untouched.
Among them is Pedro Dimas’ family. The musicians can be heard far off in the dark, Don Pedro’s fiddle singing with many tones, the tololoche bass plucking deep strings in the night. No words are sung, only music played in the long-ago tradition of the Purépecha people. The women here laugh at the sound. “Papá is still playing,” they say. “If we don’t watch out, he won’t ever stop.”
The women are in charge of safekeeping the tombs, it seems. Here at Don Pedro’s wife’s grave, his daughter Leonila and daughter-in-law Eugenia keep watch. His eldest daughter, Ofelia, is in charge of her husband’s parents’ place, where she has sat most of the night. The women are also the ones who swept and arranged the flowers, who lit the candles, with the help of sons and nephews, who come and go, eager to spend the night with friends walking around town and between the tombstones. The men, at least in this family, are busy playing music.
And they have been playing music for several days. All week, there have been cultural festivities at the Tzintzuntzan plaza, where dance groups and string “orchestras,” as the traditional Purépecha bands here are called, have competed and entertained an audience ranging from European and American tourists to locals who know the difference between a good Purépecha tune and a bad imitation. And at home, too, in the small houses the Dimas family owns in Ichupio, on the edge of Lake Pátzcuaro, the Mirando el Lago stringband has been playing music together.
On October 31, there was a mass in Ichupio to commemorate the one year anniversary of Fidel Estanislao’s father’s death. Fidel is the tololoche or bass player in his father-in-law Don Pedro’s band. After the mass in the tiny church overlooking the lake, the family went back to his house with the entire community to pray and sing and eat purple pozole, or hominy soup, made from local red corn. The arch in the shape of a church, with its central nave and bell tower, which now crowns Fidel’s parents’ graves, was set up as an altar then at the house, and people from the community took turns filing in to leave bowls of fruit and sing long songs in harmony, praying for old Fidencio’s soul.
Later on in the afternoon which led to dusk, Don Pedro got out his fiddle and began to play. One by one, his sons and son-in-law joined him on their instruments: guitar, vihuela, and tololoche. Another fiddler, Cynthia Llano Faulkner, visiting from California, tuned up her violin and joined right in with the rest. Don Pedro beamed; Cynthia, he later confided, is one of his best students; she has become “an ambassador of Purépecha music in California.”
As it turns out, Cynthia’s presence is a godsend this Day of the Dead. Don Pedro’s usual second violinist, Rafael Medina, was not feeling well this year, and they needed someone to help play in the annual contest. Besides, her strong voice lends itself to song, and in the coming darkness, the brothers began to sing with her, old ballads and quiet rancheras, for Fidel’s father.
The next day, Don Pedro’s mother, who also died this year, could not be forgotten, and the group wound its way up the small path to the next house up, where cousins and elderly aunts served fish soup and urged them to sing again. “We heard you yesterday,” prodded Don Pedro’s aunt. “Let’s hear that song Flor de las Flores.” And an old tune heard frequently in California and New Mexico sprang up in the Michoacán countryside for an old indigenous woman, now gone, as her sisters and brothers and sons and daughters and grandchildren thread loops of yarn through oranges and apples, getting ready for the evening.
Around 3:00, the family became a stir of activity. Quickly, instrument cases were loaded into the car, and sweaters were grabbed up from back rooms. A procession formed on the road: women, men and children, all carrying something: arches of golden cempoazúchil, purple orchids and a white flower that blooms at this time of year, buckets of candles, bags of fruit, boxes of bread. Behind them were the musicians, and as they walked, they began to play, marching toward the cemetery several miles away.
By the time they got to Tzintzuntzan, the arch had changed shoulders several times. It was Don Pedro’s granddaughter Mary who was carrying it in the end. Proceeding past cars and pedestrians, the family entered the cemetery, still playing. At this hour, when the sun was still up, but about to go, the candles could barely be seen beyond the grassy knolls and between the pine trees. Don Pedro’s family wove its way down to Fidel’s parents’ grave first, where one arch was set up, and Ofelia and her children began to decorate it with fruit and bread. A few tunes were played, and the musicians set off for Don Pedro’s mother’s grave, farther up the hill near a side entrance. There, while the cousins began to hang bread shaped like elephants, horses, dogs and people in the spaces between the flower-covered poles of the second arch, the musicians played traditional lively abajeños and sweet slow sonecitos. A crowd gathered, photographers snapping their cameras as the musicians played, and men, women and children whispering about the old indigenous man who plays the fiddle so very well. “Look how he moves the bow,” says one man. “Imagine playing like that,” utters a woman. “Where did he learn?” asks another.
...
[For the rest of this article, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!]
[Zaidee Stavely spent the last few years working as a freelance journalist in Mexico City, while learning to play "son huasteco" on her fiddle. She is now a graduate student at Columbia University in New York.]
 Photo: Courtesy of Johnny Frigo Archives
Johnny Frigo: Eighty Years on the Fiddle and Still Growing Younger
By Peter Anick
Johnny Frigo may well be one of the violin world’s best kept secrets. Content to ride out the jazz age as a self-taught bass player, he let his first instrument, the fiddle, spend most of its time in its case until the accidental launch of a second musical career at age seventy-two. Now well into his eighties and hailed as one of the world’s greatest jazz violinists, Johnny continues to perform and record on the violin, write poetry, and paint. A documentary about his life called “The World on His String: The Life of Johnny Frigo” has just been completed, as well as a book of his poems and artwork entitled When My Fiddle’s in the Case.
These days, most of Johnny Frigo’s appearances are near his home- town of Chicago or at large jazz festivals, so I was thrilled when producer Pat Philips brought him to the intimate Regattabar in Cambridge, Massachusetts, for a series of concerts pairing him with the French Gypsy guitarist Dorado Schmitt. Although he had never played with this group before, Johnny deftly led the band through a number of his impromptu arrangements, calling out instructions as necessary and charming the audience with his deadpan humor. At one point he peered into his violin’s f-holes and tried to read the label. “I can’t believe it! Stra... Stra... Stratocaster!” He noted that the last time he had been to Boston, he was dating Miss America. He modestly dismissed the audience applause, confessing “It wasn’t that big a deal. There were only thirteen states!”
Kidding aside, once he launched into a tune, it was easy to see why jazz critics have lavished such praise. His violin playing is charming and witty, never leaving the melody too far behind, yet full of surprises. His improvisations have a logic and expressiveness that make them sound almost like on-the-fly orchestral arrangements. Taking advantage of the full dynamic range of the instrument from delicate muted bow strokes to bold runs high up the fingerboard, Johnny’s solos captivated his audience like a great story teller.
It was no surprise, then, to discover that even without his violin, Johnny Frigo is a great story teller. And with such a fascinating story to tell, I didn’t have to do much in the course of this interview except sit back and listen, occasionally reminding him where we were chronologically when we’d drift off on some interesting tangent.
Frigo: People wonder how I started playing violin. Born on the south side of Chicago on December 27th, 1916, so that makes me almost eighty-eight years old now. My folks were very poor, super poor. So all the kids after school would do things like go through the alleys looking for junk so they could sell it to the ragman who came by every Saturday on a horse and wagon. I would sell this stuff to the ragman and he eventually got to know my mother, because she would sell him newspapers and things. He got talking to her and he talked her into my taking violin lessons with his son. I was seven years old then. He told her that his son was becoming a violin teacher and he had a small violin. She said, “I have no money for violin lessons.” And he said, “Well, they’re only twenty-five cents a lesson.” So all the weekly going through the alleys looking for junk, with those twenty-five cents, I paid for violin lessons. So I studied with him, played scales. I remember the two books were Kreutzer excercises and one other one. That’s all I knew. Then he moved away from the neighborhood, so I’d get on the streetcar. And the shaking of the streetcar would make me sick, so every Saturday I’d throw up reaching my violin lesson, because of the bumpy street car ride. So I finally gave up for that reason and also that my mother could ill afford the twenty-five cents a lesson. At that point, I was eleven years old and that’s the last lesson in music I ever took in my life. So I was all self-taught after that.
In grammar school, they had no orchestra, so I couldn’t play the violin in grammar school. Then when I went to junior high school, they also had no orchestra. But they had a little ten-piece military band. The only instrument they had that no one else wanted to play was a tuba, so because there was nothing else for me there, I picked up the tuba. I came home with swollen lips. Then I wasn’t satisfied with that and I bought a fourteen dollar trumpet and started practicing trumpet. And still practiced on the violin a little bit.
What sort of music were you playing then?
On violin, I was still playing scales. The first song I ever learned was “Long, Long Ago.” I figured in high school, they were gonna have an orchestra, so when I went into high school -- they still didn’t have an orchestra! They only had a band. So I had to play tuba again. I said, “I don’t want to just play tuba.” An old Italian fellow had an old string bass with three gut strings on it, and the high G string was tied in a knot. So without studying, I’m just slapping away on the bass. Little did I know at that point that it would be the instrument on which I would make 95% of my living for the next thirty-five years, never having taken a lesson.
That was 1934. Soon after that, I joined a little band -- Vic Abbs and the Four Californians. We would sing these songs that I arranged for the trumpet. At that point, we were playing at a place called the Glass Hat in Chicago in the Congress Hotel, and we were on radio, on KYW. Then I played with a band by the name of Al Diehm. I was playing bass and when we played a rumba, I would get a maraca, cut the handle off, put rubber bands around it, play the bass and shake it. And I would know how to keep a nice tempo so the maraca would actually have a good beat, like um-chica-chi-chi um-chica-chi-chi. And if it was a faster thing, I would tighten the rubber band so it wouldn’t flop around too much.
In those days, the piano player had a glass for “feed the kitty”; they put coins in for tips. But they’d see me singing sometimes, so they’d put a coin through the f-holes of my bass. Then I’d have to bring it home and my two brothers would have to hold it up and shake it. This one time somebody stuffed a bill in there. I happened to bring it up, “Who was that that put a bill in it? It was hard to get out.” He said, “That was Al Capone.”
After that I started playing with different groups. We played on the Rival Dog Food Program, the Drake Hotel. When the (Chicago) Cubs were really winning the pennant in their glory days, the minute the ball game was over, we’d be there in the Drake Hotel lobby. We’d be on the air every day singing and playing.
Then in 1942, Chico Marx of the Marx Brothers -- I don’t know how he heard that I played bass -- but I joined his band. Between movies, he had a run of being on stage in different parts of the country. He heard that I played fiddle so in one of the theaters, he said, “Bringa da violin down and play a song with me on da violin.” It started off as complete not knowing what we were gonna do, but little by little it worked into a routine. I remember he’d say, “Do you know Gypsy Love Song?” I said, “I think I know the chords but I don’t know the verse.” I said, “You play the verse and I’ll noodle around on fiddle.” He said, “Okay, you noodle on the fiddle and I’ll spaghetti on the piano.” You know, stupid stuff! So we ended up having a routine between Chico and myself. And then, right out of high school came the singer Mel Torme. He joined the band. So when we played at the Blackhawk Restaurant in Chicago, we were on the radio every night and I sang with the quartet.
...
[For the rest of this article, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!]
www.johnnyfrigo.com
[Peter Anick, author of Mel Bay's "Old Time Fiddling Across America," plays fiddle with the Massachusetts bluegrass band Wide Open Spaces.]
Wendy MacIsaac: Beòlach and Beyond
By Sally Driscoll
Wendy MacIsaac grew up on the western side of Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, along the bonny St. George’s Bay coast in Creignish, a stone’s throw away from cousin Ashley MacIsaac. The two-lane that snakes through Creignish and up the coastline connects the villages of Troy, where Natalie MacMaster grew up, and Judique, where Natalie’s uncle Buddy MacMaster lives, and then continues up north through Mabou, from where the Rankin Family hails. It is called the Ceilidh Trail, a name that derives from the Scottish term ceilidh, which means “kitchen party.” You can almost hear the strathspeys and reels and feel the wooden floors of the dance halls -- and kitchens -- vibrating as you drive up the coast. Stop in any town along the way, and you just might be greeted by the real thing, or as the title of MacIsaac’s first CD states, The Reel Thing.
MacIsaac moved to Halifax several years ago, but gets back to Cape Breton island frequently, for she is still in demand as a fiddler for the popular square dances, collaborates with many musicians, and enjoys visiting with family and friends. She is known throughout the world as one of Cape Breton’s finest fiddlers. She has three solo recordings, and is planning to release a live solo CD in summer 2005. Timeline, released in 2003, was nominated for an ECMA (East Coast Music Award) last year. Her band, Beòlach, has recorded two ECMA-nominated CDs and tours extensively. (The band consists of Mairi Rankin on fiddle, Ryan MacNeil on pipes and whistles, Patrick Gillis on guitar, and Mac Morin on piano.) For ten years she toured and recorded with the popular Cape Breton Gaelic singer Mary Jane Lamond, and was featured in 1999 with Lamond on the Chieftains-produced compilation CD Fire in the Kitchen. She has been included on several other compilations as well. In addition to fiddle, she plays piano and banjo and step dances. However, a certain physical condition has prevented her from step dancing in 2005: she and her husband, Beòlach soundman Stephen (Steevo) Moore, are expecting their first baby in July! She was touring in the eastern U.S. with two members of her band and her husband when she agreed to this interview.
It’s almost impossible to introduce any Cape Breton fiddler without mentioning the connections to other well-known Cape Breton fiddlers, without bringing up the influence of your Scottish roots, and the emphasis on family traditions because they are so interrelated, so much a part of the culture and the key ingredients for why Cape Breton probably produces more fiddlers per capita than anywhere in the world. If you had grown up in, say, Pittsburgh or rural Alberta, what do you think you would be doing today? In other words, how have your roots influenced your life?
I don’t know for sure what I would be doing if I wasn’t performing for a living. When I was younger I was very interested in doing skits and plays and now I really enjoy cooking and baking, so maybe I would be doing either one of those things. I think that growing up in Cape Breton gave me more than my music; it also gave me a strong sense of humor and a feeling of ease from living in such a safe and peaceful place. One thing about Cape Bretoners is that they look out for each other and are extremely generous. I think the sense of humor is the best part, particularly with the older generation. I could go and visit an older person (especially a certain few) and sit there listening to stories for a good part of a day. But for the music part, I couldn’t have grown up in a place where I would have been more exposed to it. My grandparents and parents took me to dances and concerts from the time I could walk and always had the radio on with programs playing fiddle music -- mostly from Cape Breton at that time. My parents didn’t push me to practice and they didn’t tell me what I should play -- with the exception of a few suggestions. They let me do my thing and I think that helped to keep my interest in the fiddle.
Which came first, step dancing, piano, or fiddling?
I started dancing when I was four, and the fiddle when I was twelve, and the piano when I was fourteen or fifteen.
I understand that your grandmother, Hughena Campbell, gave you your first fiddle when you were twelve years old. Tell me that story. Did Hughena also play the fiddle and how did she influence your music career?
My grandmother’s brother lived in Boston during the 1930s and his job was selling ice. This one particular woman he sold ice to could not pay him and so she traded two fiddles for the ice. Then they landed in Glencoe at my grandparents’ house and she gave one of them to me when she knew I was interested in playing. I have both of them now but I don’t use either one of them for my performing.
My grandmother passed away in August 2004 and my grandfather in 1996. They were very good to me and encouraged me to keep up the fiddling and dancing. There was always music on the radio and my grandfather whistled from the time he got up at 5 a.m. until the time he went to bed every day.
Did anyone in your immediate family play fiddle? Which other family members influenced your music career the most?
My mother was a step dancer and my dad could dance pretty well, too, but he would never get up on stage for a solo number. We had quite a few tapes around the house and they were what I really learned from. My cousin, Ashley MacIsaac, and I started at the same time taking lessons from Stan Chapman. At that time, there were a lot of fiddlers starting out like Natalie MacMaster, Stephanie Wills, Jackie Dunn, John Pelerine, Lucy MacNeil (from the Barra MacNeils), Dwayne Cote, Rodney MacDonald, Kendra Mac-Gillivray, and many more. Most of them started a few years before me but this is the crew of fiddlers I spent most of my time with for the first six or seven years.
Do you remember your first concert?
Grade six, at my school gym. I had been taking lessons for a very short while and I was very nervous!
...
At what age did you decide to become a full-time musician, and why?
At age twenty-three I was involved in a show called “The Cape Breton Summertime Revue,” which toured across Canada and right after that Mary Jane Lamond asked me to be in her band. I would say that it was then that I decided to give music a shot and see if I could make a go of it.
Cape Breton is a very nurturing community and many of your closest friends are musicians. You grew up together playing, you play on each other’s CDs, you take turns playing local dances -- it’s a very supportive environment. Do you ever feel a sense of competition or are the feelings always positive among you and the other Cape Breton musicians?
Our music scene in Cape Breton -- the traditional style music -- has never felt competitive to me. I think one good reason for this is that there were never any fiddle contests. We went to concerts where everyone would play their number or go to dances where the fiddler playing that particular night might get one of the other fiddlers up to play for a set. We were all very good friends and still are today. I hope that will remain the same for the future.
...
[For the rest of this interview, subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!]
www.wendymacisaac.com; www.beolach.com
[Sally Driscoll is a freelance writer and totally amateur fiddler in State College, Pennsylvania. She tries hard to make up for the lack of Scottish blood in her family history by listening to a lot of Cape Breton fiddle recordings!]
Robert Burns and Scots Fiddling
By David Johnson
Robert Burns, born Alloway, 1759, died Dumfries, 1796, is widely regarded as the finest poet in Scotland’s history. It’s well known that a large part of his work consisted of words for songs: who has not heard of “Auld lang syne,” or “My luve’s like a red, red rose”? Less well known, however, is the working method he used to create such songs. Nearly always he would choose an already-existing tune and construct new words to fit it, an unusual and technically very tricky method in which all sorts of things could go horribly wrong; though with most of his 370 songs everything goes breathtakingly right. In his final script he would specify, at the top of the words, the tune the lyric was designed for.
Many of the tunes Burns used already had words -- commercial, literary, or oral -- and in such cases his work often consisted only of making additions or adjustments to these. But in a significant number, perhaps a quarter, of his songs he used tunes which had no words at all, so starting from a blank canvas. This was particularly so when he set words to fiddle tunes which had been recently composed in his own time. On the internal evidence of his songs, he knew a great deal about fiddle music.
Burns’ life coincided with a glorious period in Scots fiddling. Around the time he was born, the fiddle managed to push the bagpipes and harp into the background and establish itself as Scotland’s major traditional-music instrument, and though fiddling went back to the Middle Ages the re-designed Italian violin was seen as something new, fashionable, Scottish but at the same time European, an instrument alive with possibilities. Dancing had also come to the fore after a century of religious repression; this created an enormous demand for dance music, and thus for fiddling. As a result, vast quantities of new fiddle music were being written all through Burns’ life -- reels, strathspeys, Scots measures, hornpipes, slow airs, variations -- and specialist fiddle-composers were emerging into national prominence -- Marshall, Gow and his four sons, McGlashan, Mackintosh. It was inevitable that Burns, in his quest for good tunes to write words to, should have kept a keen eye on who was composing what, and had a go at playing the fiddle himself.
The evidence that Burns played the fiddle has been overlooked by many biographers. But his first Epistle to David Sillar, who was one of Burns’ closest friends during his early adulthood, is firmly inscribed “To Davie, a Brother-Poet, Lover, Ploughman and Fiddler,” and shows that he regarded fiddling as one of his finest accomplishments.
After Burns’ death, his sister Isobel recalled that he was inspired by Sillar to buy a violin for five shillings, and that he would practise when the weather was too bad for outdoor farm work. She added that his playing was never very good; however, her views may have been “coloured by excruciating memories of her brother’s [first] gut-scraping attempts” (to quote James A. Mackay). Burns probably also learned music notation at this time; in later life he was fluent at it and had beautiful music handwriting.
Burns’ first lyric to a fiddle tune is “O Tibbie, I hae seen the day,” dating from 1777, when he was eighteen. It set to “Invercauld’s Reel,” a strathspey composed in honour of Invercauld Castle in Aberdeenshire (Example 1).
It’s worth asking what subject matter this tune suggests. Perhaps a description of a lavish castle ball, or of the noble Deeside landscape? No, Burns’ lyric is about much more homely matters, though it’s sharp, satirical and urgent. It’s a complaint about a girl who has dropped him, on discovering he has no money:
O Tibbie, I hae seen the day,
Ye wad na been sae shy;
For laik o’ gear ye lightly me,
But trowth, I care na by.
Yestreen I met you on the moor,
Ye spak na, but gaed by like stoure;
Ye geck at me because I’m poor,
But fient a hair care I.
[repeat the first 4 lines as chorus, then:]
I doubt na, lass, that ye may think,
Because ye hae the name o’ clink,
That ye may please me at a wink
Whene’er ye like to try.
[repeat chorus]
But sorrow tak him that’s sae mean,
Altho’ his pouch o’ coin were clean,
Wha follows ony saucy quean
That looks sae proud and high.
[repeat chorus]
But Tibbie lass, tak my advice,
Your daddie’s gear maks you sae nice,
The de’il a ane wad speir your price,
Were you as poor as I.
[end with chorus]
[Glossary: gear = money; lightly = to slight; yestreen = last night; spak = spoke; stoure = cloud of dust; geck = toss one’s head; fient a = not a; clink = cash; quean = girl; nice = finicky; the de’il a ane = not one; speir = enquire]
How well the words and music match! The strathspey has to be slightly adjusted for singing -- the birls replaced by Scotch snaps, the repeats omitted, the whole a little slowed down -- but once this is done the two bond completely. After one has absorbed Burns’ words, the strathspey tune and Tibbie’s mindless arrogance belong together.
...
[For the rest of this article, and the tunes "Invercald's Reel (strathspey)" and "A Rose bud by my early walk," subscribe to Fiddler Magazine!]
[David Johnson is one of Scotland's leading musicologists; his writings include Music and Society in Lowland Scotland (2nd ed. 2003), Scottish Fiddle Music in the 18th Century (3rd ed. 2005), and contributions to Grove's Dictionary. He is also an active composer with a catalogue of around 50 works, ranging from operas to pieces for schoolchildren. A catalog of his publications, including the tune book Stepping Northward (fiddle with cello accompaniment), can be ordered by writing to him at david@djmusiceditions.freeserve.co.uk] |
