Music

Category Editor Paul Burgess

Music is an integral part of singing and dancing and often an accompaniment to other activities like processions and ceremonials.

Singers and Dancers are just as much musicians as people who play instruments.

Folk tunes are very often divorced from their original setting and played for another purpose or just for the joy of it. Thus a song tune can become a dance tune or a concert piece.

Sometimes a good tune inspires the addition of words to make it a song.

All of these things happen.

Here we can pool information about where tunes came from, when, what they were used for, possibly who published them, how they travelled and where they are to be found now.

Traditional Players

The definition of a musician's nationality can be loosely applied. Some players were born in one country and lived in that country all their lives playing whatever music came their way in a style that could be described as belonging to that country. Other players were born in England but their parents were Irish or Welsh, etc.

Other players were born elsewhere but learned and played in the midst of the culture into which they were born.

Yet others were born in a country and played music from another tradition or style in a venue of their country.

It doesn't really matter that much. This section is just to narrow the search.

Australian Traditional Players

The major part of the work in documenting Australia's traditional players was done by the late John Meredith in association with a number of other researchers.

Here is a list of the known performers.

See also the National Library of Australia pictures catalogue for John Meredith's collection of pictures of traditional players. (Search on John Meredith and Creator).

Instruments

• Fiddle

• Viola

• Cello

• Double Bass

• Bagpipes

• Pibgorn (Hornpipe)

• Melodeon

• Pipe & Tabor

• Piano Accordion

• Button Accordion

• Concertina

• Harmonica

• Flute

• Piano

• Jaw Harp

• Harp

• Triple Harp

Resources

Recordings

• Argo Records

• Firebird Records

• Musical Traditions Records

• Leader Records

Manuscripts

Many musicians over the centuries have written down their repertoire in music books and some of the old ones have survived into the 21st century. The oldest one so far identified was written down by Henry Atkinson of Morpeth Northumberland and is dated on one page - 1694.

Some good work has been done in transcribing these books and making them available as paper published tunebooks or as ABC notation collections on the internet.

• Manuscripts by County

• Tune Manuscripts List

Books

• Books published since about 1900 containing mainly tunes from the English repertoire

• Books containing tunes from the Welsh Repertoire

Historical Publications

The most useful list of historical dancetune books on the web is the 'Early American Secular Music and its European Sources' website. This was researched in the later 20th century and is a very good overview of the field, with only a few omissions of books that have come to light more recently. http://www.colonialdancing.org/Easmes/index.html

Another huge resource based on years of research is the late Bruce Olson's website . Some of the material on the site has become redundant since his death in 2003, yet it remains a valuable tool for serious scholars. http://www.fresnostate.edu/folklore/Olson/index.html

Tunes and dances are bound together and when Walsh and Simpson, et al published the tunes the dances often came attached. Mostly, modern musicians raid the tunes and skip over the dances.

• List of historical tunebooks, some of which are available on the internet

• Music Publishers

Tunes

Tunes

Such a small word - such a big subject! This is not the place for storing tunes, those places exist in the links below, but to give a flavour of the commoner sort here are some examples Tune Index

If you feel the need to add tunes read this first Policy for tune pages

• James Stewart's Index of Tunes is an online PDF database of 70K tunetitles (only) and which books they can be found in.

Online Tunes

• The Village Music Project
  

A study of English social musicians from the 17th Century onwards from their manuscripts. Contains information about fiddle manuscripts, plus many of their contents transcribed into ABC notation.
http://www.village-music-project.org.uk/

• The Farne Project
  

A selection of texts, pictures and recordings of Northumbrian Traditional Music, including a number of traditional tune resources. There are scans of one of the oldest tune manuscripts in England written down by Henry Atkinson in 1694. There are recordings by a variety of musicians including Willy Taylor, Joe Hutton and Will Atkinson.
The Farne Project

• Morris Tunes on the Morris Ring website

ABCs, dots and mp3s of Lionel Bacon's Black Book, plus links to other sites.

[http://www.themorrisring.org/music ]

• John Chamber's Tune Finder

This excellent resource trawls the web for tunes in abc format and allows the user to retrieve the results in a variety of ways. You just need to know something about your target tune to narrow the search.

Find tunes

• Chris Walshaw's Search Engine on the ABC Notation Homepage

Type in a title and see the tunes pop up, in notation, midi and ABC notation.

ABC homepage

• The Traditional Tune Archive

A major source of tunes and a place to contribute them is The Traditional Tune Archive - The Semantic Index of North American, British and Irish traditional instrumental music with annotation, formerly known as The Fiddler's Companion. [1]

• Biteyourownelbow

Another long list of tune collections on the internet, from Mickey Koth. Free collections of tunes in gif, jpg, pdf, png, or tif format and/or in ABC notation[2]

Online Session Tunebooks

Here are some online collections to give a flavour of tunes that are current nowadays in various informal music sessions in Britain and beyond. The descriptions may be taken from the compilers' own websites.

• Paul Hardy's session tunebook. Mainly traditional Celtic and English from the British Isles.

• Lewes Favourites website. Tunes. A good, large (200 tunes?) fundamental English repertoire, courtesy of the Lewes English Tunes Practice Session, in particular Bryan Creer and the late Andy Warburton. The following tunebooks are often subsets of this one, but worth browsing to get an idea of the first two dozen must-have tunes.

• The Alton Steady Session website contains link to a small tunebook

• The Bath and Bradford on Avon Sessions website. Concertina World Tunebook, includes tips on session etiquette.

• Chorley Slow and Easy Session website contains links to two PDF tunebooks

• Dorking Folk Sessions website contains a link to a small Steady Speed tunebook

• The Ewell Sessions website contains a link to a small tunebook

• Chris Partington's English Session Tunes website What do you play when you’re in a “Mainly English” session with musicians you’ve just met for the first time? ABCs and PDF

• The Duke of Wellington Folk Tunes Session FB page. Tunes. We (they!) are a friendly group who meet on the second Thursday of every month at The Duke of Wellington 119 Balls Pond Road, London, N1 4BL. .

• Folk at the Beech website We (they!) will have 133 tunes in the 6th Edition of our Tune Book, you will find them on the 'Playing Tunes page' when it has been updated. They are currently available as pages of music as pdfs and ABCexplorer files. We have also made them available as midi files.

• Freds Folks Ceilidh Band website Not strictly a session, but common session tunes nonetheless

• Horsmonden sessions website workshop page contains link to tunes and the session