READIN

Sunday, January 31st, 2010

🦋 Étude/Song

I spent a lot of time practicing my fiddle tunes yesterday. These tunes -- generally Irish or Appalachian tunes, mostly in 4/4 time, mostly with two sections of 8 or 16 bars each -- I mostly play as a sort of étude, just getting used to playing the violin fast and clear and with a constant beat; something nice can happen when I have played a tune enough times, become familiar enough with it, that it will metamorphose from a practice tune into an actual song... when this happens it is as if I start hearing actual expressed meaning in the notes rather than just the bouncing melody. That transformation took place yesterday with the Irish song "The Boys of Blue Hill" -- suddenly that song is a part of my consciousness, not just a melody in my ear. Here are the fiddle tunes I feel familiar enough with that I think of them as songs:

• Bonaparte Crossing the Rhine
• Bonaparte Crossing the Rocky Mountain
• Bonaparte's Retreat (almost -- I still don't totally understand the B section)
• Old Joe Clark
• The Irish Washerwoman (the odd man out -- this song is a jig, in 3/4 time)
• The Growling Old Man and the Carping Old Woman
• The Boys of Blue Hill

I am thinking I should try and build a songbook of fiddle tunes, similar to what John and I are doing with our songs. (I am wanting to do recordings of some of these, hopefully before to long I will upload some mp3's.) Below the fold, a list (in no particular order) of songs I am working on, that are getting close to inclusion in the songbook.

• Harvest Home (this works great as a medley with Boys of Blue Hill)
• Whisky Before Breakfast
• Bill Cheatham
• The Red-Haired Boy
• Devil's Dream
• The Girl I Left Behind Me
• Angelina Baker
• The Halting March (another odd man out -- this song is 4/4 but its structure is very different from all the rest of these.)
• Haste to the Wedding (jig)

(The fact that most of these titles are in the first half of the alphabet may give you an idea of how I approach my alphabetically-organized book of fiddle tunes -- generally to sort of let it fall open at random but biased toward the front of the book, and turn pages until I see something that catches my eye.)

↻...done

posted morning of January 31st, 2010: 3 responses
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🦋 The Boys of Blue Hill

Here is a recording I made of "The Boys of Blue Hill":

Update -- as long as I'm recording some fiddle tunes -- I added a take of "The Growling Old Man and the Carping Old Woman" to this post. And here is a tape of Graham Townsend playing the tune:

posted morning of January 31st, 2010: Respond
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