Gross travesties of Pictish art

After I finished the Trinity College harp neck decoration sheet, I thought again about the issues surrounding this type of art, considering the sketchy and approximate versions of this scheme that we have seen up to now even on the best copies of the harp.

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Ceòl Rí Innse Gall

I am preparing for Wednesday’s concert here in St Andrews. I am going to play a programme of “Ceòl Rígh Innse Gall”, my speculative re-imaginings of medieval West-Highland ceremonial music. This project is still very much a work-in-progress, and I am still thinking hard about how this music should work, and what sources of inspiration and musical material to raid.

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The Harmony of the World

Some years ago, I got the CD of Willie Ruff’s ‘realisation for the ear’ of the planetary tones from Kepler’s Harmonices Mundi of 1619. Just recently I noticed that his web page has been updated with a very interesting Youtube interview where he discusses this project. Well worth a listen: Continue reading The Harmony of the World

Kelt and Keltic, or Selt and Seltic?

I find myself, before a Scottish audience, in a position of phonetic ambiguity. Do I say Kelt and Keltic, or Selt and Seltic? As an Englishman, I use the former pronounciation from habit, though aware that Scottish usage favours the soft ‘c’, as does the O.E.D., giving ‘Keltic’ only as a secondary alternative.

from Stuart Piggot, Celts, Saxons and the Early Antiquarians, The O’Donnell Lecture 1966, Edinburgh University Press, 1967, p.4

Rory Dall Morrison tunes

On Saturday in the Wighton Centre, we were talking about Rory Dall Morrison, the blind harper of Dunvegan in the 1690s. So today I went back to my PDF Rory Dall tune list, and added in all the tunes for his songs. I was also bolder in moving more of the tunes and one of the song airs into the ‘misattribution’ section.

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Two-bell ringing

Sometimes at St Salvators tower we are short-handed, and we have been gradually working our way though The Chris Higgins Guide To Three-Bell Ringing (ed. Ian Chandler, Kirby Manor Press 2003). I have been enjoying the elegant simplicity of the music as well as the physical challenge of placing and striking the bell well.

Today, being the first day of semester at the University of St Andrews, and also the morning of the clocks changing, there were only two of us. There are two two-bell methods in the book, and we tried them both – Cambridge being a little more pleasant, with more intellectual challenge as well as less physical. But then I fancied something different and so invented on the spot some stedman-style methods which I see now loking though my notes also share some charateristics of the ultimate 3-bell method, Shipping Forecast.

The idea is to lie, point and lie. You can lie for 2 or 3 blows, and you can arrange the blocks of 2 and 3 lying adjacent or alternating.

x=xx=x=xx= or x=xx==x=xx== or x=xx==x==xx=

We rang the three and the five, the University’s two medieval bells, whose minor 3rd interval was to me the characteristic sound of the tower before the augmentation in 2010.

I wonder if it would be possible to make a connection with the binary music of Robert ap Huw and the other late medieval / early modern Welsh secular instrumentalists? Was this most fundamental art of change ringing used before changes on higher numbers were developed?

In medieval Welsh notation we might write for the three methods above
00100.11011 and 001000.110111 and 001000.111011

Finally we discussed a little what to call this type of ringing. The book unimaginatively describes these methods using just the word “two”. We can do better than that. The convention for odd numbers of bells is to count the number of simultaneous changes possible, so on 3 is singles, 5 is doubles, 7 is triples, and so on. On even numbers, Latin descriptors are used: 4 is minimus, 6 is minor, 8 is major, &c. I proposed “micromus” but I don’t know if that is too silly!

Ethnomusicology VSI

I got the new Very Short Introduction to Ethnomusicology by Timothy Rice last month and I have been meaning to do a post about it for a few weeks now. This book is part of the VSI series published by Oxford University Press. I have been collecting this series for a very long time, because I find the small format, the high production values and the artistic covers very attractive. Though having said that, I noticed that on the more recent volumes the binding has changed from a stitched paperback to perfect-bound which does lower the tone a little.

Books in the VSI series tend to be either excellent or rubbish. The constraints of the format – a small 100-ish page paperback that is to summarise an entire field of study or knowledge for the educated general reader, is very hard and it is interesting to see the authors strain to present complex spreads of ideas concisely and clearly.

The Ethnomusicology volume is one of the excellent ones. Partly it retains its focus and clarity by addressing and describing Ethnomusicology as an academic discipline, which gives the book a clear sense of structure and purpose. What do professional ethnomusicologists do, how has the discipline evolved and changed, what are the current political and ideological faultlines in the discipline? This is in great contrast to, for example, the volumes on Folk Music or World Music which struggle from the outset to define their subject area (and which both quickly admit that they don’t have any coherent definition to offer)

For me there were a number of useful insights or viewpoints to explore further. One was the issues of notation, “music as text”. But most interesting thing mentioned in the book, I thought, was the discussion of trance. I have come across ideas of trance in music before, but this book has reminded me that this is something I need to look into further.

Tutor book 2nd edition

I have completed the revision of my harp tutor book. “Progressive Lessons for Early Gaelic harp“.

The 1st edition was published in 2009 and I was starting to be unhappy with some of the text and instructions, and also with the music notation. When I first wrote the book, I was really unsure about including notation of the tunes. I seriously considered just omitting all the notation, and I did just that when I re-wrote the book in simplified form as “Clarsach lessons for young harpers“.

I feared that people would put the book up on their music stands and start sight-reading from the notation – and I have seen that happening.

So for the 2nd edition I am making a brave experiment – I wrote to Queens University Belfast to request permission to reproduce facsimiles of Bunting’s manuscripts, and so the music notation of the first edition has now been replaced in the 2nd edition with manuscript facsimiles. This has forced me to explain the music more clearly in the text, but the idea is that the text explanation plus the recorded examples on the CD will make everything clear.

So “Progressive Lessons” has become more serious and hardcore – but I feel OK with that because “Young Harpers” is available as a more easy and accessible introduction to the material.

I haven’t announced the 2nd edition yet – I’ll update the web pages for the 1st April update. But any orders placed from now on will get the 2nd edition.