Summer 2004
ARTICLES
COLUMNS
- Fiddle Tune History: The Dancers, by Andrew Kuntz
- The Practicing Fiddler: Reading 101, Part Two, by Hollis Taylor
- Cross-Tuning Workshop: DDAD, by Jody Stecher
- Practical Hints on Irish Fiddling: Jigs, by Brendan Taaffe
- On Improvisation: Working Backwards Toward Solutions, by Paul Anastasio
- Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour: Cape Breton's Winston "Scotty" Fitzgerald, by Gordon Stobbe
- CD & Book Reviews
- In Memoriam: Claude "Fiddler" Williams
TUNES
- Seanamhac Tube Station, by John Carty
- Pèlerinage, by Peter Anick
- Nancy Dawson's Hornpipe (Fiddle Tune History)
- Aldridge's Hornpipe (Fiddle Tune History)
- Richer's Hornpipe (Fiddle Tune History)
- Dick Sands' Hornpipe (Fiddle Tune History)
- Big John McNeil (Fiddle Tune History)
- Dinkie's (Fiddle Tune History)
- Glenn Towle (Fiddle Tune History)
- Bonaparte's Retreat, transcribed by Jody Stecher as played by Ed Haley (Cross-Tuning Workshop)
- Chestnut Street, by Brendan Taaffe (Practical Hints on Irish Fiddling)
- Southern Melodies Polka, by Winston "Scotty" Fitzgerald (Cross-Canada Fiddle Tour)
ARTICLE EXCERPTS
John Carty: Out of the Smoke
By Brendan Taaffe
I met John Carty in the summer of 2003, when he was teaching at the Catskills Irish Arts Week in East Durham, New York. We had a chance to sit down and talk, and I had the chance a week or so later to hear him and John Blake in a small concert in Vermont. It was easily one of the best performances of Irish music that I've seen, and one of the few times I've found myself laughing in the midst of a tune. John is a masterful and a playful performer, treating his tunes with great thoughtfulness and innovation, and throwing in these little musical jokes along the way. 'Tis a pure pleasure to hear him.
John grew up in London -- known then as "the big smoke," an amazingly fertile community for Irish music. Learning his tunes from the likes of Bobby Casey, Finbar Dwyer, and Roger Sherlock, Carty more than lives up to that legacy. The thoughtfulness and innovation remind us of the depth this tradition can possess, and the jokes along the way remind us that it's all about having a little bit of fun.
Let's start at the beginning. Where did you grow up?
I grew up in East London, a son of the 1950s emigration to London. It was big [at] that time -- my parents, uncles, in fact the whole family, bar the old people, moved over for work. It was a massive emigration, one you could put on par with the 1920s in New York.
That was when people like Casey and Sherlock were going over.
All those boys, yeah. And they were young men [at] that time, so there was a huge music scene around London. It always does remind me of what I hear about the scene in New York: vibrant, plenty of great music, from all corners of Ireland. I'm a product of that musically; that's where I was bred, born, and reared.
And where did your family emigrate from?
My family came from County Roscommon. My father came from north Roscommon, just bordering on South Sligo, and my mother came from Connemara. I live back now in the Carty homestead in Boyle, County Roscommon. Back there about twelve years and left the working life, the regular working life, to move back. Living on the family farm, being described as Ireland's worst farmer -- coming from London, the city. And I've taken up playing music, and that's where I'm at.
Did your father play?
Dad was a flute player, and he also played some banjo and fiddle. He played in the Glenside Ceili Band. The one person you might know that played in the band was Kevin Burke; Kevin was a young guy, only sixteen or so. Dad's still alive and well, and he's a lovely Roscommon-style flute player. Understated, but nice.
The Glenside was operating out of London, right? And didn't they win an All-Ireland?
They won the All-Ireland in 1966, and were up against very good company. Castle Ceili Band were there, and some great bands at the time. It was a good time for them. My father used to teach us to play fiddles, but he didn't have no patience for that, so it stopped. Then a guy named Brendan Mulkere moved in to where I was living, and he was like the Martin Mulvihill of London. He had huge Irish music schools, and does to this day. I used to go along to Brendan -- I was playing the banjo at that time. I'd be playing the fiddle at home, but I got confident playing the banjo, and played it out more. So I'd be very well-known as a banjo player, especially in England, and in Ireland.
When I've talked to people in your generation who grew up in Ireland, a lot of them grew up with a sense that there weren't many other young people playing. Were there other young lads in London playing?
Yes. There was, but we never played in sessions. It was really the older musicians that you'd go to hear -- there wasn't a scene of younger people, even though they were learning to play. It was a private thing; we wouldn't be meeting up in a pub [at] that time to play in a session. There were the various Fleadh Cheoils going on, and that was really where social interaction started. But other than that, you were a young fellow, you went along and you had to listen to these great musicians. It was that sort of a scene. And plus, the music was played in a pub with microphones. It wasn't like a session. There were three people being paid to play, and they'd call guests up. And certain pubs, they wouldn't need to put songs in with it. It was just strictly reels, jigs, reels, jigs -- mainly reels. There was a famous pub called the White Hart; Roger Sherlock used to play regularly there with Raymond Roland, and that was a great stand for music. People would chat, but they'd be all listeners.
So it would just be two or three people playing, and that might rotate.
Right, Roger wouldn't be playing every night. It might be a fellow by the name of John Bowe. There'd be different combinations.
But one of those nights, say when Roger Sherlock was playing with Sean Maguire, is that all you'd hear that night?
Mainly -- and then if they'd see one of the musicians, they might call him up and he'd do a solo spot.
It was more like a concert than a session.
It was, you know. But it was a really lovely concert, because you could have a drink and you could have a chat, but you'd listen.
Who were you playing with then, as a young person?
As a young fellow, I was going to hear all of those fellows and I played with them when I was young. I was only about sixteen when I first started playing at the White Hart with Roger Sherlock and Raymond Roland, and then there were other people around London, people who were a little bit older than me, people like Brian Rooney. I used to go to hear them and loved their music, and eventually started playing with them in pubs.
I'm curious about that intermediate spot, between where you've taken some lessons and are starting to learn some tunes, and then you're one of the people being miked. What was it that kept you interested and improving?
I love the music, and I love going to listen to music, and that was the outlet for it: listening. I'd be playing away then at home, and then if there was a young fellow in, they'd call you up for a tune. You'd be mad to get up and play. Tommy McCarthy was a great musician, and Bobby Casey -- they'd call you up to play. But there wasn't many young people following Irish music. There were people that went to classes. But they weren't that mad into it that they'd be going to all these places -- there was only a few of us that were into it.
All that early playing was on banjo.
When I was sixteen I used to get the odd tune on the fiddle, after it had all finished. Bobby was great: he'd always say, "Give us one on the fiddle." So I used to get the reputation then, handy enough like, playing fiddle. But I didn't have great confidence [at] that time. There were some great fiddle players. You wouldn't be mad to play after hearing Casey play, or Danny Meehan play, or some of these great players. We were very respectful of these fellows.
Playing two instruments, do you find that they complement each other, or has it been learning totally different things?
They're totally different. Primarily I listen to fiddle music. Even when I was playing banjo, I was still a great fan of fiddle music: Tommy Peoples. Frankie Gavin. I used to love listening to all of those people, and that's what I was trying to emulate on the banjo, but then of course I was playing the fiddle as well. Then I really got into the music of the 1920s from over here in the States: Morrison, Coleman, Killoran, Lad O'Beirne. And when I moved home then, to a place that I have an emotional draw to, which is Boyle, in County Roscommon, it's just a stepping stone from that area of Sligo. That's when I really got into the fiddle, big time. About twelve years ago, I started playing around and then did the recording, and it was received very well. Then Shanachie asked me would I do a whole album of fiddle music for them, which was called Last Night's Fun, and I did. And they signed me up for a three album record deal, so I'm now a millionaire.
And Ireland's worst farmer?
Yeah, I'm Ireland's worst farmer.
...
[Brendan Taaffe is a farmer and teacher in central Vermont. He plays fiddle, guitar, and penny whistle. He has a CD called Come Sit By My Chair. www.brendantaaffe.com]
 Photo: Jean-Paul Pecache
Brittany Haas: At the Heart of the Music
By Michael Simmons
Introduction: I first met Brittany Haas about nine years ago when I was working at Gryphon Stringed Instruments in Palo Alto, California, and she had started taking fiddle lesson from Jack Tuttle. Although she was only eight years old, her considerable skill on the violin made an immediate impression on the musicians who used to hang out at the store. Jack would fill me in on her progress over the years, and I knew that one day she would be a good subject for a story in Fiddler Magazine. Earlier this year Brittany made her recording debut with Darol Anger's group the American Fiddle Ensemble, so it seemed like a good time to write about her. For this article, I thought I'd do something a little different and include two short interviews with Jack Tuttle and Scott Nygaard, two musicians who have worked with her over the years. I thought this approach might give a bit more insight into some of the issues that come up when dealing with a young but very talented musician.
The recent release of the American Fiddle Ensemble's debut CD Republic of Strings has let the world in on the not very closely guarded secret that Brittany Haas, who was sixteen when she made the record, is one of the finest fiddlers in the old time, Appalachian style. Surprisingly, for someone who has so thoroughly assimilated a style so associated with a specific region, Haas grew up far from the Appalachian Mountains in Menlo Park, California, a quiet town not far from Stanford University.
Brittany started playing violin when she was five years old, but as she tells the story it was a matter of luck rather than desire that led her to the instrument. "A friend of mine wanted to play violin because he saw a wandering musician playing one at a wedding," she says. "He wanted to take lessons because he thought that was so cool but he didn't want to go by himself. Since we were best friends, our parents thought it would be fun for us if we both started Suzuki group lessons together. It was a fun, spur of-the-moment thing, but after just a few lessons I really got into it." (Brittany's older sister Natalie saw how much she was enjoying the violin lessons and decided she wanted to learn to play the cello. She also proved to be a quick study and is now attending Juilliard and playing professionally with Alasdair Fraser.)
She discovered that she had a real gift for music and she quickly wound up playing in various youth orchestras, attending violin workshops, and gearing herself up for a career in classical music. And then things took a different turn. "When I seven, my violin teacher gave me some simple fiddle tunes to help with my sight reading," she says. "They were tunes like 'Bile Them Cabbage Down,' and the arrangements were completely violinized, but I really liked them." Brittany kept asking her teacher for more tunes and she recommended stopping by Gryphon Stringed Instruments and buying a book of fiddle tunes. While she was there, Brittany's mother Barbara picked up Jack Tuttle's business card, but she waited a year before calling him. "Britt's teacher didn't want to give her any more fiddle tunes, so I dug Jack's card out of my purse and gave him a call," she recalls.
Brittany and Jack connected from the beginning. "I loved him as soon as I met him," she recalls. "He was very kind and patient. From the start, fiddling seemed more fun than the classical thing. I had only taken a few lessons with him and he asked me to his square dance band with his wife. That in turn introduced me to the dances and the whole fiddling community. Jack also taught me quite a bit about other fiddlers and would bring in transcriptions for me to work on. That was where I first learned about Bruce Molsky. I think Bruce was the first old time fiddler I ever heard. There was something about the music that just clicked internally and I knew immediately that it was the music of my heart. There's something about the ringing quality. It's so big and rich."
Brittany continued to take lessons with her classical violin teacher as well as with Jack. Although the teacher wasn't completely happy with that, she suggested that if Brittany wanted to pursue fiddling, she might want to investigate Alasdair Fraser's Valley of the Moon music camp. The teacher knew that Fraser was classically trained, and perhaps she felt that he would keep Brittany from falling into any bad habits. So Brittany, who was then ten years old, went to her first fiddle camp and met her new hero, Bruce Molsky.
"I was so young when I first heard Bruce play," she recalls. "But I was able to watch him closely during those classes at the Valley of the Moon. When I went home I could hear in my head all the music he was playing and the way he played it. I worked hard on replicating his bow movement, the sort of figure eight pattern his arm makes when he plays. The classical technique helped in some ways when learning fiddle, but as I began to understand the music more, I did have to un-learn a lot of the classical ways of bowing. Classical music is more concerned with smooth bow movements and it doesn't really use the bow in a strong rhythmic way. It doesn't have that strong pulse where you dig into the strings -- it's more about creating a smooth tone."
Molsky, for his part, was equally impressed with the young musician. "When I first heard her I was impressed with her enthusiasm and focus," he says. "I'm not really sure how she latched onto old time music, though. It sure wasn't peer pressure. I guess there was just something in it that moved her in a certain way, even when she was ten years old. She was already well on her way to mastering the style and all I did was fill in a few blanks. She now uses her bow almost like a percussion device, which is something she got from me. I have a strong chord sense because I started out as a guitarist and she may have picked some of that up from me as well, because I hear a lot of that in her playing. But she's not a slave to anyone else's ideas. She has identified the essence of the music, which allows her to play some extended stuff without losing the heart of the music."
...
Brittany decided to devote herself full-time to fiddling and wrote to Darol Anger to see if he would take her on as a student. He had heard about her from Bruce Molsky, so he agreed to take her on. "We started out with formal lessons, and later he asked me to play at one of his concerts that featured a bunch of different fiddlers," she says. "That was where I met Rushad Eggleston and Scott Nygaard. Not long after that we formed the American Fiddle Ensemble."
Although Brittany does have occasional lessons with Anger, she feels she has more of an apprentice/mentor relationship with him than a traditional teacher/student relationship. "I've only had maybe twenty formal lessons over the course of a few years," she says. "But I learned so much about fiddling by watching him play. I think he's such a genius and I can't believe that I get to stand up there on stage with him." She also says that working and rehearsing with the American Fiddle Ensemble has taught her quite a lot about the day to day life of a professional musician and about the discipline and dedication it takes to succeed.
The music the AFE plays is far removed from the old time fiddling she has been playing, but she welcomes the challenge of learning new styles and techniques. "I hope to move into a more improvisational thing like Darol does," she says. "I've been playing in a swing band called Gaucho, with Dave Ricketts, who plays with Paul Mehling in the Hot Club of San Francisco. I like playing in the swing band because it gives me the chance to play more improvisational. In the Appalachian style, everyone is sort of playing all the time, but in the swing band everyone gets their turn to solo. You get your chorus and you tell your story. I've also been listening to Swedish music as well as fiddlers from the other Scandinavian countries. But I know I'll always play the Appalachian music because it's my first love."
Brittany is still in high school, so she has to find a way to fit her practice time, rehearsals and gigs in with her schoolwork. "I practice a couple of hours a day," she says. "I'll work on transcribing tunes and I do some scales and stretching. I also play classical for fun these days. I'll play some Bach or maybe some etudes. I do play classical with Darol, although he 'Darolizes' it. He did a Bach partita and worked out some more fiddling type of bowing for it. It sounds pretty cool. I'm lucky that my teachers understand about my fiddling, and they're pretty good about giving me the time to do it. Sometimes I have to do homework on the way to gigs, though."
Although she has managed to blend her school life and her music life fairly well, there are still times when they clash. "I've recorded a solo CD of Appalachian tunes with Darol, Bruce, Rushad, Scott, as well as Mike Marshall, Todd Sickafoose, Alison Brown, and my sister Natalie," she says. "A couple of labels have expressed interest in releasing it, but because I can't tour to support it because of my schoolwork, they decided to pass. I think it turned out really well, so we may just release it ourselves."
Brittany's not the only musician who thinks her CD sounds good. "I brought a dub of Britt's CD home and after listening to it a few times, I thinks it's begun to change the way I play music," says Bruce Molsky. "She's brought some interesting ideas into the music that I find very appealing. It doesn't matter how much of a hard-core folkie you are, or how much of a slave you are to tradition, in the final analysis, you have to play like you. And that's the case with Brittany. She has already discovered how to play like herself."
www.brittanyhaas.com
American Fiddle Ensemble: www.darolanger.com; www.compassrecords.com
[Michael Simmons, Fiddler Magazine's Review Editor, is a guitar player and writer living in Mountain View, California. He is co-publisher of the Ukulele Occasional, a frequent contributor to Acoustic Guitar and Guitarmaker, and the author of Taylor Guitars: 30 Years of a New American Classic.]
A Trio of Internet Stars: ABC Musical Notation
By Sally Driscoll
For traditional musicians who use the Internet, life has become easier and a bit sweeter thanks to the ever-expanding, never-ending amount of available resources. Yet there are some sites that are used over and over; they shine brightly in the online traditional music universe, but we know little about their creators. I felt that it was time to acknowledge a trio of Internet stars who have touched fiddlers' lives deeply: Chris Walshaw, John Chambers, and Andrew Kuntz.
Walshaw plays bagpipes, whistle, and flute and teaches computer science and math at the University of Greenwich, England; Chambers plays the accordion, fiddle, mandolin and flutes, and is a software designer and computer programmer in Boston; and Andrew Kuntz plays the fiddle, button accordion, and mandolin, and is a mental health outpatient program director in New York. All three play in dance bands. They have never met each other, yet their musical passions and technical acumen allowed them to each create different web resources that are so intertwined it's as if they were lifelong, intimate members of the same band.
Many readers may recognize their names or popular web sites. Chris Walshaw created ABC music notation (see sidebar at right), that spurred technically-savvy musicians around the world to create and share a variety of ABC software and/or post their tune collections in ABC format. His web site is considered the home of ABC and is typically the first stop for anyone dabbling in ABCs. According to Google, there are over 400 sites that link to this home page.
Andrew Kuntz created The Fiddler's Companion, a database that provides engaging information about traditional fiddle tunes including the origin, known variations, recorded and print sources, and ABC notation. For the past several years, Ceolas, the Internet's "home of Celtic music" has hosted the database, and according to their latest statistics, the database receives thousands of hits every day.
John Chambers created JC's Tune Finder, an ABC search engine that returns a variety of file formats, including .gif and .pdf, from approximately 300 ABC web collections. Statistics show an average of 6,500 searches a day, with as many as 15,000 recorded one day.
It's fair to say that these web resources have impacted significantly the history of the transmission of traditional music, by allowing fiddlers to increase their repertoires of traditional tunes at unprecedented rates and contemporary tunes before they are even recorded; by offering quick and easy exposure to different genres, styles and techniques from around the world; and by offering simple access to a variety of historical information that will increase the fiddler's knowledge base and provide for a well-rounded approach to music.
John Chambers relays this anecdote, which displays the advantages that the most technology-savvy musicians have at their fingertips:
"I was at a dance camp in the wilds of the Berkshires and someone asked, 'How does that tune go?' While they were trying to remember it, I whipped out my cell phone, a Kyocera smartphone, which is also a Palm Pilot. It had service, so I fired up the browser, connected to my tune finder and typed in the tune's name. I copied one of the tunes over to the ABC program that I have installed, hit the PLAY button, and the tune came out through the phone's speaker. This got me an incredible amount of geek points with the crowd."
Change that to "geek points with the world!"
I interviewed each musician in winter 2003 so that readers could become more familiar with the humans behind the sites.
Chris, you note on your web site that you introduced ABC in 1991. Did you design ABC by yourself or was it a collaborative effort?
Chris Walshaw: No, it was just me, although there have apparently been alphabetic music notation systems used informally for many years by all sorts of musicians.
Which came first, your computer knowledge or ABC notation?
When I first invented/discovered ABC notation I didn't even know how to turn a computer on. ABC was first designed purely as a shorthand aide-memoire, with no thought of computers at the time. When I did first start implementing it as a program, it was just for my own use. One of the things that I've always worried about slightly with ABC is that people will see me as a computer geek who dabbles with music rather than a musician who happens to know how to use a computer (which is how I think of myself.)
You provide a comprehensive list of links on your web site. There is software for various platforms, including Macs, Windows, Unix, and Palm Pilots; there are programs for specific instruments such as bagpipes, guitar, and mountain dulcimer; there are programs that will create harmonies and programs to help create tune databases; there are links to tune collections of interest to all fiddlers. It is astounding to think about how quickly the traditional music world embraced your notation.
One of the most interesting uses is John Adam's Village Music Project. The idea behind this is to transcribe, and make available online, old manuscripts from some of the English Village fiddlers and musicians who were around in the 18th and 19th centuries. Since these manuscripts are generally held in libraries and museums with no hope of republication, this represents a fantastic resource. Like some other ABC projects, it is a collective endeavor with a team of volunteers, and really demonstrates the power of the web at bringing people together.
John, how did your tune finder come to fruition?
John Chambers: The music area is interesting, because there's a lot of "music" online. But we have a problem in the English language. We don't have any way to distinguish "music" that you put in a player and listen to from "music" that you put on a stand and read. Try it with any search site, and you'll find that this is true. Readable music is buried under 100 times as much information about recorded music, and there are no good keywords to distinguish them. If you want to find the readable music, you need something more specialized than the keywords that the big sites use, so you can weed out all of the irrelevant sites that are talking about recorded music. I wrote it (The Tune Finder) because I'd noticed a growing number of web sites with music in ABC form, and I'd also noticed that the big search sites aren't very good at handling this sort of data. This isn't really much of a criticism, because they were designed to handle ordinary text. But it's frustrating if you're a musician. So I decided to write my own specialized search program. This made it easy to find other people's tunes. Then I mentioned it to a few friends.
Can you explain how The Tune Finder works, so that everyone can understand?
As with any search site, there are two stages. There is a "search" program that has a list of starting URLs. It starts at those and follows links, looking for files with ABC tunes. It builds a small database listing the URLs, tune titles, keys, and so on. Then there's the lookup web page. It takes what you type, looks it up in the database, and shows you the matching tunes. And then there's the third stage, in which you can request a conversion from ABC to that list of other formats.
Do people have to submit their URLs to be included in the list?
No. I have a little program that queries a few of the big search sites (Google, Alltheweb, and Teoma at present) for "ABC tunes notation," which is the best search string that I've found so far. They have found maybe sixty of the ABC sites that I know of. The other sites have mostly come from URLs that people sent. In a few cases, my search program has followed links from one machine to another and found ABC tunes. This isn't surprising, because musicians often know each other, and if they have a web site, they link to friends' sites. Sites with ABC tunes often link to each other.
How many collections or URLs are included now and how often do you update the list?
I try to run the search about twice each month. (At the time of the interview, there were exactly 288 sites with ABC tunes.) The number of "sites" is actually a bit higher, because some machines have ABC files that belong to more than one person, and those really do qualify as multiple sites. The number of URLs is a bit trickier, but the last search revealed 53,839 URLs. These had 137,407 tunes and 154,583 titles. Some time ago, though, I did a count and found that each title occurs between three and four times. This is mostly because of copying and a lot of ABC transcriptions appear on more than one site. Also, a tune can have several names, and a name can go with more than one tune. This doesn't take into account variant spellings, and musicians are very sloppy about spelling! I'd estimate that there are 50,000 or so actual distinct tunes online in ABC form, but the exact number is impossible to determine.
You mentioned that your site receives an average of 6,500 searches a day. That's a lot of users!
Yes, it's a convenience for a lot of traditional musicians. I use it a lot myself. I'd like to add, though, that my site by itself is of little value. The real value are those 288 sites that have tunes in ABC form. I'm constantly encouraging people to transcribe their gang's versions of tunes and put them on a web site (and send me the URL -- this will ensure inclusion.)
What would your ideal online traditional music resource be like?
I'm not sure. Musicians are so different, and the ways they use their music has so much variety, that I doubt whether we can come up with an ideal site for all of them. More likely we'll end up with a lot of variety. We can already see this. My Tune Finder and the Fiddler's Companion are radically different sites and both are useful. You could combine them, but the result would be messier and harder to use than either is now. Maybe we'll think of a clever way to combine them. Maybe we won't.
Andrew, was the Fiddler's Companion (F/C) originally in print?
Andrew Kuntz: The F/C has never been in print. It was created as an electronic medium from the outset, when I started indexing in 1986 on an old used Apple II machine. I wanted to retain the feel of a print medium, however, and deliberately chose to do the project on a word processing program rather than a relational database program as I wanted to retain the look and feel of print in an electronic format. I was looking for a more "encyclopedic" feel since I was turned off by how database formats were presented. I think the F/C is perhaps "warmer" because of that, but I've sacrificed some important search, query, and report functions because of the choice. The "encyclopedia" feel has been important to me, however, as I wanted the F/C to be a repository for lore and not just data. The shape, scope, and value of lore seems antithetical to relational database schemes, to me, and I've seldom met a fiddler who wasn't as interested in fiddle lore as they were in the music itself.
Tell me more about the background of the F/C.
In 1986 I self-published a collection of old-time songs and tunes called Ragged But Right on my Staggerin' Willie Music Publishing label. (Staggerin' Willie is the name of the protagonist in a song by the old time band the Chicken Chokers.) I had enjoyed researching and transcribing music for the book so much that I wanted to do something similar, something to do at home that I could pick up and put down as parenting allowed, a project that would have some breadth to it, and I wanted to be able to incorporate interesting stories, background information, speculations and even oddities and absurdities that have become attached to traditional fiddle music. In those first few years I began shaping the
F/C according to my own, perhaps idiosyncratic background. I was a musician and had an interest and background in music history; the contextual relationship of music in a particular culture and time. I also was highly influenced by my clinical social work background, taking me further into exploring relationships and influences between tunes embedded in both (tune) families and subject to the vicissitudes of cultural exchange.
...
What is ABC?
ABC is a code, or language, for notating tunes in an ascii format, made popular thanks to the ease and speed which tunes could be shared via the computer. ABC files can be deciphered without software, which is especially handy for non-computer users or situations where transcription software such as ABC2win is not available. Transcription software, typically freeware or shareware, can produce sheet music and midi files from the ABC format without a large investment of time and energy.
There are many comprehensive collections of traditional tunes available online in ABC format and an Internet search or a visit to the ABC Home page will provide listings.
To search for a particular tune online, use John Chamber's (JC's) Tune Finder. It delivers tune results in various file formats such as .pdf and .gif without the need for transcription software.
An example of "Irishman's Heart to the Ladies" in ABC from The Fiddler's Companion:
T:Irishman's Heart to the Ladies
L:1/8
M:6/8
K:A
|:a|ecA BAF|AFE EFA|Bdc BAB|cBB Baf|ecA BAF|AFE EFA|Bdc BAB|cAA A2:|
|:B|c>ee dff|c>ee ec>A|cde eaf|ecA B2A|cee dff|cee ecA|B/c/dc BAB|cAA A2:|
Stellar Sites:
Andrew Kuntz's The Fiddler's Companion: www.ibiblio.org/fiddlers/FChomepage.htm
John Chambers' (JC's) Tune Finder: http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/findtune.html
Chris Walshaw's ABC Home page: www.gre.ac.uk/~c.walshaw/abc/
ABC tutorials:
John Chambers': http://trillian.mit.edu/~jc/music/abc/doc/ABCtutorial.html
Steve Mansfield's: www.lesession.co.uk/abc/abc_notation.htm
Examples of popular ABC collections (in addition to the collections available at the above sites):
Cranford Publications (Cape Breton and Scottish tunes): www.cranfordpub.com/tunes/abcs/
Henrik Norbeck (Irish and Scandinavian tunes): www.norbeck.nu/abc/
Richard Robinson's TuneBook (English, French, Balkan, Irish and more): www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/RRTuneBk/tunebook.html
Mentioned in the article:
John Adam's Village Music Project: http://146.87.55.6:85/index.htm
[Sally Driscoll is a librarian at Penn State Altoona and has been playing the fiddle for about five years. When she's not fiddling, she's requesting fiddle books and videos through inter-library loan, searching online for tunes, or planning her next workshop or fiddle camp.]
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