Richard Robinson's Tunebook - miscellaneous comments
History, etc
This all came about because I like playing tunes. I first started learning tunes somewhere around '74, '75, and shortly after that I learnt that it was a good idea to write them down before I forgot them. And the more I went on playing with different people and learning different tunes from them, the more the pile of paper grew and the harder it became to find the one I was looking for. In the mid-80s I went and got involved with computers, and a while after that I concluded that they ought to be capable of organising the helpless mess that my collection of notes had by then become; so, somewhere around 1990 I set about trying to make this happen. A few years after that, along came UK home-consumer Internet access, and the next thing I knew, I was leaning on the bar of the Chemic pub in Leeds, chatting with Peter Nix about this new-fangled World-Wide-Web thing, and he put it to me that it would be a really good idea if I rigged up some html indexes for the stuff I'd accumulated and he'd put it on the Leeds University Music Department's webspace. "Don't be silly, no-one'd be interested" I said ...So, I seem to remember that the first version went up in the summer of '94. Originally it contained something of the order of 1,000 tunes, in one big shapeless list, and then it carried on growing. The One Big List approach started to look clumsy (and also slow to download, in the days of slow modem connections. Being "only a home user" myself, I've always tried to have this site make as few demands as possible on the people who might find it useful), so I started looking for ways of structuring things under different sub-headings. So now there are several big lists; the original material, with subsequent additions, is what you'll find listed under My own collections.
Of course, once I started doing this, it all got out of control. It turned out other people had stuff that they wanted to put up somewhere, and since I had the means of doing that they passed it over to me (I'm still more than happy for contributions , by the way, if anybody wants), so other stuff started accumulating, people started coming up with manscripts, and old books they'd found buried in the murky depths of libraries, and then there was a whole bundle of other collections.
So, there's a lot of different stuff here. What it all has in common is that it continues to stick to my basic idea of being a collection of "traditional"-style tunes (the quote-marks indicate that I don't intend to provide a definition for this word. But it's more useful these days than "folk-music", which seems to have acquired so many different meanings as to be more or less unusable). Geographically they tend to represent my own interests, since I supply most of the material (though as I say, I'm happy to take contributions, so if you think it should include more of what you're interested in, go ahead, send me what you'd like it to include). But I intend for it to stay within the limitation of being useful to people who like such tunes - I don't intend to branch out into songs or dance-representations, orchestral arrangements, transcriptions of jazz solos, or any of the many many other subjects that I don't know enough about.
Some comments on the transcriptions
I have conversations with people occasionally who'd like to know how much weight they can place on the details of what they see here. This is a good and interesting question, and it has a whole range of answers depending on exactly what it is they're asking about. They fall into two broad categories, as outlined above :-
My own collections
This is stuff that arises directly out of my experiences as a tune player -
the working notes, if you like, of a late 20th / early 21st century
"traditional" musician. Things that I've bumped into and wanted to remember,
things I've wanted to get round to learning at some point, little bundles of
other people's tunes that we might play together if there's anything that
catches our interest, the "books" of bands I've played with ... it was
because this was the first material here that I came to describe the site as
my "Tunebook". It's a mixture reflecting the musics I'm interested in
playing, and the elements of those musics that I've encountered. In other
words, the tunes you'll find under this category are either my
transcriptions (either from something I've picked up by playing it with
other people, or from a recording), or are taken from bits of paper, or abc,
passed to me by other people, being stuff that they've either transcribed
for themselves or taken off bits of paper passed to them by ... ad
infinitum.
When I first started playing, I was living in Leeds, in the north of England. Subsequently, I lived for a few years in the far north of Scotland, made friends in Orkney and in the middle of Sweden (Jämtland), and now I'm in Lancaster; and most of what I've picked up has come from people in those areas. So, roughly speaking, those are the tunes that I've picked up in the places they come from, and thus the ones that you have the best chance of meeting a decent version of here (musicians being what we are, of course, this is not a guarantee that anyone else will agree about that). Irish tunes are common in sessions all over the northern UK, so there are also a lot of those - many of these are in fairly "grass-rootsy" lowest-common-denominator versions. There are also a number of French tunes, which I've mostly picked up in Lancaster, where there are people who like them. I'm not really very familiar with the French playing, and pass these on as they came to me, without knowing much about how "authentic" they may be. Oh, and then there are bits from the Balkans, and further afield, which I know even less about.
Of course, different people play tunes differently, many of these exist in at least 23 other variant versions - a fact which I have never really made any coherent effort to notate, apart from maybe changing the dots to reflect a "current" version. It doesn't bother me. Next time I go back to play anything here I may not play it as it's written, either (alternatively, in some cases I may insist that what I have is right and I won't change it. The tune-by-tune details of this are way beyond discussion or enumeration here. *grin*). If I have any specific comment about the source of a particular tune, it will be found in the ABC for that tune.
Also, of course, I'm human. I have likes and dislikes, I pick and choose. This isn't any kind of exhaustive or authoritative collection, it's one person's viewpoint. My instrument is the clarinet, and it's arguable that this leads me to favour tunes in D and A (many of the Scots 'A' pipe tunes go particularly nicely. This causes puzzlement from other clarinet players - I use a clarinet in A, you see. If anybody wants to try these tunes on clarinet, I recommend this. Most of the tunes you meet favour the sharp keys, so life becomes much easier). This also, sometimes, results in notes lower than my lowest (C#) getting shifted into something else that I can play, often without my really noticing. And then the selection that I can publish here is skewed further into favouring older tunes, by the need to respect copyrights.
A note about The Notes
The general attitude I take is that traditional music is primarily a "word of mouth" thing - the playing is what's real, music is what you hear; Any notation is only a description of that, a starting-point or a memory-jogger. Coupled with the fact that this all takes time to do (which no-one is paying me for, I might point out), this tends to lead me to write terse versions, with obvious leading notes omitted, a lack of ornamentation, and other shortcuts (where I am given something that includes extra markings - guitar chords, the occasional set of words, fiddle bowings, that kind of thing, I include them as given, but I don't add anything like that on my own account. I'm a clarinettist, I wouldn't know how). It's assumed that the users will be to some extent familiar with the styles of tune they are seeing here and capable of "decoding" the descriptions here for themselves. This is particularly the case with respect to rhythmic styles - conventional notation is not strong on catching the subtleties of this, and much of the time I haven't even tried. 4/4 hornpipes, for instance, are mostly written here in an even-quavers style, but would commonly be played with the first of each pair longer than the second; and many of the various Scandinavian 3/4s need even more interpreting. Having said so much to put you off, perhaps it's worth pointing out that I do try and make sure that the notes indicated are the ones I meant (*sigh* usually. The question of the relationship between the notated "name of a letter" pitch of a note and its actual sounding frequency, in whatever scale you choose, is very firmly not discussed here. There are cases, particularly in Scandinavian playing, where the instruments that can play "between the notes" will do so, and make that an important part of their playing. I have made no attempt to mark this. See also the Great Highland Bagpipe. "The precise pitching of all notes shown here is left as an exercise for the interested reader").There are whole essays to be written on the ways in which the written bare bones of a tune are fleshed out into traditional styles of playing, and I'm not going to attempt to write any of them. You "just have to know these things" and my notations here are intended for people who do, or want to learn. If you find things here in a style you're not familiar with, find some recordings to listen to or better, some people to play with, and hear how it works by picking it up from them. Word-of-mouth music, okay ?
Other collections
These are ABC representations of pre-existing printed collections, prepared
by myself and others. This is a different situation from that described
above, in that the ABC transcribers are not notating something they've heard
for themself; somebody else has aleady produced the notation, these files
just provide a translation of that into ABC.
I can't comment on the approach taken in the files I haven't written myself, some of them may contain their own comments. In the ones I've done myself, my aim has been to copy what was written - the key signatures, time signatures, dynamic markings, the tying of notes, slurs, staccatos, trills, pauses & other expression markings, repeats & structural markings, and so on, are transcribed the way they are because that was how they were on the paper I've copied. Some of them look like songs - if any words were given, they will also have been transcribed, along with any other text. But I haven't attempted to preserve the formatting (line-breaking) of the staves, this has been rearranged in favour of legibility.
There are cases, particularly with the handwritten manuscripts, where something might seem "obviously wrong"; or even, in the most extreme cases, not playable as given. I have tried to keep my own preconceptions out of it and leave these as they were, for others to make what sense they can out of them (with occasional exceptions, detailed in the notes below).
The spellings of titles and other text are as given, except that I have not preserved the case of titles :- my html indexes sort titles alphabetically on the first capital letter, so I have altered any articles and other such "unimportant" words to conform with this scheme.
In most cases there are no markings as to what "sort" of tunes these are - reels, hornpipes, etc - and I've preferred not to guess, so the html indexes include no "sorted by type" lists. And since they are collections from a single source there's no point in "sorted by country" lists.
More detailed notes on
- Aird (vols 2 & 3) transcription notes.
- Winder transcription notes.
