Lowland Amusement

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LOWLAND AMUSEMENT

One piper's exploration of the music of the Scottish Lowlands, its history and its performance. It's a diary of discovery, not a series of essays. You're invited to make your own contributions using the comments option on most pages.

Distractions, distractions

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Details: Created on Tuesday, 26 February 2013 19:14; Written by Peter Stewart; Hits: 431

Just in case you thought this blog was completed deceased I thought I'd better add a post, just to say I am yet again distracted, first by updgrading the website, then by upcoming presentations , to the International Bagpipe Conference on March 9th and then a workshop at the Bagpipe Society Blowout at the end of May, not to metnion the LBPS competitin. However, I have been listening again to some recordings I made a while back of tunes from Henry Atkinson's fiddle manuscript and from William Dixon's book. Hopefully I will get a moment to post about these soon...

Hacking Hackie Honey

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Details: Created on Friday, 29 March 2013 16:12; Written by Peter Stewart; Hits: 249

I've spent this week practicing 'Hackie Honey' from Wm Dixon's MS and this morning had a moment of enlightenment. This is one of those tunes whose quaver runs sometimes seem to end at a cliff-edge - here is the first two bars of strain 5, for instance:

the last two notes of each bar seem to hang in the air with the result that, when I play them, the very last one, arguably the most important, gets thrown away in the rush to get the next note in place. I've struggled often with this kind of thing in music with this feature - a common device in the early 18th century repertoire, not just Dixon.

So what did I discover today? I found the trick, which is to treat those last two notes not as the end of the current phrase but as the beginning of the next phrase, almost as a pick-up. The music then runs on into the following passage and each note is much more likely to get its due attention.

What's more, this principle can be applied to all those six-quaver groups, and to many of the four-quaver ones too - treat the last two notes as the beginning of the next phrase.

Not only does this give the notes their full value, but it keeps the music driving on, shifting the 'weight' onto the next beat, just as the dancers shift their weight ready for the next step.

Maybe this is news to no-one but me; but if so, I wish someone had told me ages ago...

hornpipe and diddle

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Details: Created on Saturday, 28 January 2012 11:41; Written by Peter Stewart; Hits: 1236

I've been planning to say something about the hornpipe, but till now haven't been able to figure out where to start.

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The Lowland Mazurka

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Details: Created on Saturday, 28 January 2012 16:12; Written by Peter Stewart; Hits: 1004

Last year I managed to pursude the Music Dept. of Edinburgh Central Library to purchase a copy of the recently published edition of the Balcarres lute book. This manuscript, for so long unavailable for research, is a treasure house of Scottish music at its turning point at the very end of the 17th century. I was aware of many of the wonders it contains, but I was taken by surprise by two settings of a tune it calls 'Rothes Rant', and which comes nearer than anything I have yet encountered in the Scottish sources to being a mazurka.

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1 2 3 continued

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Details: Created on Monday, 11 June 2012 13:49; Written by Peter Stewart; Hits: 546

An intruiging demonstration of the matter of performing 3-time tunes from the early 18th century was suggested to me by a post on the tradtunes email list; it involves a discussion of the difference between two dance forms, the 'muineira' and the 'Jota'

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Johny Cock Thy Beaver

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Details: Created on Tuesday, 14 August 2012 18:48; Written by lbps admin; Hits: 856

Playford's 1684 setting of this well-known lowland tune ['A Scottish tune to a ground' is Playford's note] was one of the tues I played recently at the LBPS evening at the Glasgow Piping Live! Festival. This is one of thoe tunes that the more I play it, the more complex the interpretation of its simple notation becomes.

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pushing the envelope

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Details: Created on Tuesday, 06 November 2012 11:38; Written by lbps admin; Hits: 475

Just a quick post here since there's been a rather extended gap. I've spent the last couple of weeks tuning the fiddle up again, for the first time for quite a while, preparing for an extraordinary weekend playing with Callum Armstrong, culminating in a performance at last Saturday's Annual Collogue in Edinburgh. Callum and I spent a day at Julian Goodacre's house in Peebles working on three tunes, two from William Dixon's manuscript and one of Callum's own tunes. The Dixon tunes were 'My Love Comes Passing By Me' and 'Gingling Geordie' [a tune which appears in several other collectins, including Playford's 'Original Scots Tunes']. However, Callum is such an inventive and adventurous [as well as exemely talented] musician that things were never going to be that simple. Some of the results will soon be available elsewhere on the site, but I have to say that there were moments during our day of practice where things happened that were unlikely to happen again, hence my remark on Saturday that 'you should have been here lastg night'. To sit down with a player like Callum [he is a student of baroque recorder at Trinity College, London] with only an outline plan for how the performance might proceed, and the knowledge that anything might happen in the next few bars, is likely sometimes to produce spectacular resutls, but is also just as likely to prove less than successful; either way it was a trully exciting experience for me; I hope it was, at least some of the time, for those in the audience on Saturday.