Tune Add: English Tunes

Subject: English Tunes
From: GUEST,Steve
Date: 03 Jan 04 - 09:27 AM

Hi everyone,

There are plenty of sites dealing with Irish tunes out there, but does anyone have any favourite sites (with sheet music) dealing with English music?

I am especially interested in any stuff from the East Anglia or the West Country although I realise that this may be a tall order!

Thanks

Steve.

Subject: RE: Tune Add: English Tunes
From: GUEST
Date: 03 Jan 04 - 10:36 AM

Here is a link to some Cornish tunes, but you will need NWC to get the dots.


Regards
Marion

http://www.vpmag.com/nwc/racca.html

Subject: RE: Tune Add: English Tunes
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 03 Jan 04 - 11:08 AM

The Wren Trust    is a publishing and teaching charity for the promotion of the traditional music of the West Country. I have been using their William Andrews Tunebook, part of the Baring-Gould Heritage project aimed at returning the 650 tunes and songs he collected to the public domain.

Subject: RE: Tune Add: English Tunes
From: treewind
Date: 03 Jan 04 - 11:50 AM

Try the Village Music project, if you can find it. The web site's buried in the Salford University site and has been ruined by being forced to comply with daft web site presentation rules, and Johnny Adams is looking for an independent site to host it. It's also moved to a different address (which I've forgotten) within salford.ac.uk so some Google indexes may be out of date.

The ABC home page has links to collections of music on the web - at least one of these is categorized by country of origin.

The Lewes sessions favourites are also on the web, and many of those are English standards.

Also recommended: Mally's (Dave Mallinson, publisher) "English Choice" series, so far one by Nick Barber and a more recent one by John Kirkpatrick.

Anahata

Subject: RE: Tune Add: English Tunes
From: Malcolm Douglas
Date: 03 Jan 04 - 05:18 PM

The English tune repertoire can be a bit confusing; musically, England has been pretty cosmopolitan for quite a long time, so alongside the home-grown tunes you'll find stuff from all over the place. Obviously there is good deal of Scottish and Irish material in the repertoire (and tunes written in "typical" Scottish and Irish styles by English musicians -both were fashionable at various times- and indeed English tunes that got taken up in Scotland and Ireland and later came back in "naturalised" forms), plus tunes from further afield; Canarios (Spanish) and La Curacha were popular during the 19th century, for instance. There are plenty more like that.

Music from the theatre often turns up, too, and a good few dance tunes originally came here from America with the Minstrel shows as "Ethiopian" songs, though some of those were recycled tunes from (mainly, I think, but by no means only) England and Ireland. There are some interesting oddities in the current repertoire, too; Michael Turner's Waltz (actually an untitled piece found in Turner's MS tunebook; he was a 19th century fiddler in Sussex) turns out to be the second part (the Trio) of Mozart's German Dance no.2 (KV 536 no.2, 1788). Turner must have heard it at the local Assembly Rooms or some such, and written it out from memory when he got home. The Huntsmen's Chorus escaped from Weber's opera Der Freischütz and established itself in the wild. Have a look at these sites:


Ann Winnington's Tune Book Scans of an entire MS tunebook. I can't remember what part of the country it's from, but the contents are reasonably typical of 19th century tunebooks.

William Calvert's Tunebook Scans of an entire MS tunebook. Comments as above.

The Henry Atkinson Tunebook, 1694 Not online yet, but described. Part of the NE England "Farne Project", which promises great things but is perhaps doing a little too much advertising and not enough delivering just at the moment.

Bear in mind that MS tunebooks don't necessarily represent the active repertoire; much of the material is likely to have been written down for later learning or for occasional use as required, so would be "passive" repertoire. Many of the touring theatre companies travelled with only a small core group of musicians, and would hire local musicians to make up the rest of the orchestra; the large number of Scottish and Scottish-style song tunes (widely used in 19th century musical melodramas, frequently based on the works of Scott) may in part be down to that, though they were pretty fashionable at that time anyway.

For older material, there is a good bit of stuff on Henry Playford's Dancing Master available just now. Some of the tunes are still played, though not always under the same names. See

The Dancing Master, 1651-1728: An Illustrated Compendium Robert M. Keller's Playford site; all the tunes printed in the various editions are indexed and examples of notation for each provided. The scans, unfortunately, aren't very good (black and white - ought to be greyscale) and can't always be properly read.

Dancing Master Edition of 1698. Library of Congress, page images.

Dancing Master Edition of 1728. Library of Congress, page images. This copy used to belong to Alfred Moffat, who did a lot to re-popularise music of the period.

Subject: RE: Tune Add: English Tunes
From: The Borchester Echo
Date: 03 Jan 04 - 08:35 PM

Village Music Project as mentioned above here.

It's a really difficult site to negotiate, but worthwhile.

Subject: RE: Tune Add: English Tunes
From: GUEST,Steve
Date: 05 Jan 04 - 04:15 PM

Thanks to all - especially Malcolm for his very comprehensive list.

That gives me something to have a go at.

Steve