Re: Curiosity about keys


"Richard Robinson" <richardR@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:462a664a$0$514$bed64819@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Marjorie Clarke said:
"Richard Robinson" <richardR@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

So, do we have another aspect of The North-South Divide here ? Do tunes
get
sharper as you go north ? (In point of fact, I suspect Swedes'll play
happily in any key, but why spoil the chance for a pointless argument ?)

I know this is a bit obvious, but isn't it a lot to do with the
instruments
favoured in different areas?
Scots music is often fiddle-led, and fiddles like playing in A.
Accordions
are popular too but they can play in any key, so A is not a problem for
them.

English music is often driven by free-reed boxes (melodeons,
anglo-concertinas) which are very limited in their keys, so will usually
play in G or D. Then there's the pipe music of the north-east (and also
Scotland) which can be in - well, whatever key the particular pipes are
in,
but they don't hop from one key to another like the Scottish
fiddle-and-accordion combos do.

I have no idea how this relates to Swedish music. I rather like the idea
of
tunes getting sharper as latitude increases, but I fear you may have
trouble
finding evidence to back it up.

Curses, foiled again !
Except, it also goes the other way, doesn't it ? People play what they can
on the instruments they have, but also they get instruments that'll play
what they want. So it goes round in circles, like the bread-and-butter
fly.

Well, that's true too. When I decided to buy and learn melodeon, the guy in
the shop advised me, very sensibly, that if I wanted to play in sessions or
for morris or other dancing, a G/D box was the way to go. With an expensive
and bulky item like a melodeon, you can't exactly buy a whole set of the
things in different keys, the way you can with whistles and harmonicas, so
you settle for the one that will fit in best with the music you want to
play.

I think sometimes people who don't play a diatonic instrument don't
appreciate that it's not a matter of being stubborn, or not being clever
enough to change keys; you simply only have certain notes on your
instrument - a bit like having a piano with no black notes. Some diatonic
boxes have a couple of accidentals, but some don't, and even then the basses
are very restricted.

So, does this bring us back to an Intrinsic Englishness, an "I can only
play
in G" gene ? Was it always like that ?

From my scant acquaintance with older English dance music as it's now
transcribed (fiddle tunes, Playford etc) I'd say that G,D, A and C were all
used frequently, probably in that order of importance but I could be wrong.
And I suppose the "village band" music that used brass instruments may have
favoured entirely different keys. Maybe when the diatonic anglo-concertina
and the melodeon became popular, and people started playing in informal
groups and bands (which wasn't so common in the past), there was a need to
restrict the keys to the ones they came in, and so the tunes in A and C
tended to get dropped from the repertoire or transposed.

If I had more time I'd pull all the keysigs out of the VMP, Winder,
anything
else I can find, and count them. But as it is, the town's full of
hurdygurdies and I'm on my way out. The record so far is 11 in 1 session
(playing; they don't count if they're still in the box).

That sounds quite scary. You can't really go against the combined might of
11 gurdies.


--
Best wishes,

Marjorie
Reply email: mc at springequinox dot co dot uk


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