Music
Category Editor Chris Partington
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.
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
Online Tunes
- Chris Walshaw's Search Engine on the ABC Notation Homepage [1] Search engine. Type in a title and see the tunes pop up, in notation, midi and ABC notation.
- John Chamber's Tune Finder [2] Search engine. 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.
- The Traditional Tune Archive [3] 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.
- James Stewart's Index of Tunes [4] is an online PDF database of 70K tunetitles (only) and which books they can be found in.
- Morris Tunes on the Morris Ring website [5] ABCs, dots and mp3s of Lionel Bacon's Black Book, plus links to other sites.
- The Village Music Project [6] 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.
- The Farne Project [7] 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.
- Biteyourownelbow [8] 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
- Manx Music - Manuscript and ABC format [9] contains a significant body of the music collected on the island by W.H. Gill, J.F. Gill and Dr J. Clague, as compiled by Colin Jerry in the book 'Kiaull Vannin'
Online Session Tunebooks
Here are some online collections to give a flavour of tunes that are current nowadays in various informal English 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
Tune Books since 1900
There have been many books of tunes printed since the beginning of the 20th Century; many are out of print but can be obtained second-hand
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.
Historical Publications
The most useful list of historical dance-tune 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 a few omissions of books that have come to light more recently, or weren't in the targeted libraries.
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.
Recordings
Labels recording instrumental music are included in the main Recordings list along with song etc.
Traditional Players
Click on the title to go to the page
Instruments
Click on the title to go to the page
Academic Studies
There are a number of academic theses available online which may be of interest
Campbell, Stephen William John; Doctor of Philosophy University of York,Department of Music, October 2012 Reconsidering and Contextualising the Vernacular Tradition: Popular Music and British Manuscript Compilations (1650–2000) PDF