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Irish Music On An English 'tina.cd


mike delta

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All this cross-talk between English and Anglo is stimulating my interest to explore the unknown (in my case that’d be an English).

...

I’m reconsidering now though, and so I think I’ll plan a trip in the next day or two to see if it’s still there and will examine it closer with an eye towards possible purchase.

Go for it!

 

It may be wishful thinking on my part, but from what I've seen in your posts, I think you'll enjoy the new horizons the English will show you.

 

Not giving up the anglo, of course.

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...I ran across this Roger Digby article elsewhere on concertina.net titled "Time for an English?"

An interesting article.

 

With that title, I expected it to be promoting the concept of taking up the English, but instead Roger seems to be answering his own question with a "no". But aside from deprecating the historical use of the English (and even the anglo, though to a lesser extent) in "folk" music, it's really not about the English at all. It just says that the reasons Roger finds are commonly given for considering the anglo to be "inadequate" are invalid. In that I would agree, though I certainly wouldn't accept it as an argument against taking up the English at all. I think they're both wonderful... and so are the duets. :)

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I've toyed with whistle-style crans on the English, but haven't really worked on them. I understand that what are called "crans" on the anglo are really a very different animal, but I've never tried them, so I have no basis for comment.
I think they're pretty similar, but I'm not much of a whistle player -- the main note followed by several descending notes from a higher pitch, back to the main note, which may be repeated.

Sounds wrong. On a whistle, the cran has the main note broken into parts, just as with a roll, but successive grace notes are always separated by repetitions of the main note. You seem to be saying that the grace notes follow one another, without the base note in between. That's really quite different. Is that what's called a "cran" on the anglo?

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I've toyed with whistle-style crans on the English, but haven't really worked on them. I understand that what are called "crans" on the anglo are really a very different animal, but I've never tried them, so I have no basis for comment.
I think they're pretty similar, but I'm not much of a whistle player -- the main note followed by several descending notes from a higher pitch, back to the main note, which may be repeated.

Sounds wrong. On a whistle, the cran has the main note broken into parts, just as with a roll, but successive grace notes are always separated by repetitions of the main note.

Like many things, I think it depends on whom you ask. I Googled "whistle crans" and the first hit was to a whistle tutorial that illustrated crans (via a video clip) without the repetition of the main note. Then I looked at a couple of other sites that described crans as repetitions of the main note interrupted by cuts. The latter seems more uillieann pipe-like to me, and more interesting than the simpler approach. But really, aren't whistle crans better topic for Chiff & Fipple?

 

Getting back to Anglo concertina ...

You seem to be saying that the grace notes follow one another, without the base note in between. ... Is that what's called a "cran" on the anglo?
Yes, at least that's how I was taught. I have a handout from Micheal O Raghallaigh's 2005 class at East Durham, and it lists 9 possible crans. In abc notation, the first cran, on D, would be represented:

 

DdBAD

 

The E cran is:

 

Eec(G)E

 

where the parentheses indicate an optional note. An so on up the scale. Except for the three highest crans, all of the notes between the "bookend" main notes are descending. The highest cran is

 

ed_e=e

 

Because all of the notes of the cran are played in the same bellows direction (depending on whether the main note is press or draw), you could, I suppose, try to keep the main note going through the cran, but I just tried that and it drowned out everything else. And I don't think it would be possible for mere mortals to play fast enough to repeat the main note between the higher notes, e.g., DdDBDAD, in the time usually allotted.

 

I believe Noel Hill taught the same D cran, but I don't have any notes on that, and I don't recall him teaching us any other crans.

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It may be wishful thinking on my part, but from what I've seen in your posts, I think you'll enjoy the new horizons the English will show you.

 

Not giving up the anglo, of course.

Thanks for the vote of support Jim. I'm going to look at a few, listen to them and give it some serious thought. In my early days of playing Anglo I think it would have been exceeding difficult to cross between Anglo and English, but I believe my Anglo coordination is "ingrained" enough now that it wouldn't be a serious problem (or at least not one that couldn't be overcome).

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It may be wishful thinking on my part, but from what I've seen in your posts, I think you'll enjoy the new horizons the English will show you.

 

Not giving up the anglo, of course.

Thanks for the vote of support Jim. I'm going to look at a few, listen to them and give it some serious thought. In my early days of playing Anglo I think it would have been exceeding difficult to cross between Anglo and English, but I believe my Anglo coordination is "ingrained" enough now that it wouldn't be a serious problem (or at least not one that couldn't be overcome).

Go for it, Bruce, you certainly can't lose out by trying a different system.

 

Regards,

Peter.

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I have tried to understand and failed. Cran, makes me think of cranberry crumb cake. What is the origin of this term? The discriptions without notation only confuse me further, after all I have a handicap being an English player and a tenor :P .

 

At session in the coming week I'll ask the flute player to do one for me. Perhaps I'll experience a great "Ah-ha", or more likely I'll be left cocking my head from side to side as my bulldog does after I mistakenly say one of the words he recoginzes: cookie, walk, cat, pizza.

Edited by Mark Evans
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Bruce, I ventured into English a few years ago. If I had spent more time on it I would probably be more fluent now, but I do play it (mostly in C, G, and D, how anglo-ish) at least a couple of times a week (lately, that's as much as I play anglo). I wrote a little piece about it that you can read here. (Wow, took me a while to find that page...the only link is from the English buyer's guide.) This thread should be appended to that page! Anyway, few took note of this topic a few years ago, and now there are many of you discussing it. This community has grown tremendously, in more ways than one.

 

Real progress would be a C.net T-shirt with an English (or even a Duet) on it. Paul told me once most photo submissions he got years ago were not good enough resolution. Maybe that would be easy to fix today, with so many better cameras. What should go on it, some Aeolas and Edeophones?

 

I hope we're not driving Al nuts with all these names of EC players, he likely has plenty already! B)

 

Ken

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I hope we're not driving Al nuts with all these names of EC players, he likely has plenty already! B)

 

Ken

 

My mention of David and Grey were not intended for Al to go chasing down like one of his setters might :D . I imagine Mr. Larson might even blanch at the mention of his sorted past with English. Both artists had an interesting take on English ITM highlighted by their restraint which is often in short supply with most contemporary recordings I've sampled.

 

I'd love a C.Net Tee with an English. Hope if it happens there are a few roomy XXL's.

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cran

"In Great Britain, a unit of capacity for fish, specifically herring, since 1852 the quantity needed to fill 37½ imperial gallons (about 6.03 cubic feet, or 170.5 liters). Since 1832 it had been defined legally as 45 wine gallons, almost exactly the same value.1 Under the Herring Industry Board's rules, and Weights and Measures Regulations, any herring not sold by the cran must be sold by weight. A cran typically contains about 1200 fish, but can vary from 700 to 2500.2

 

The cran originated in Scotland as a heaped measure. A standard but bottomless 30-gallon herring barrel was filled to overflowing with fish, and then the barrel was lifted off. Because the fish were heaped, the resulting pile contained more than 30 gallons of herring – observers estimated around 34 wine gallons.3

 

The cran was not a legal measure in England and Wales until 1908.4

 

In the United States, the size of the cran was fixed “from and after the first day of June, 1816, the cran to be used for the purchase and sale of fresh herrings...shall be of the content or capacity of forty-two gallons English wine measure.”5"

 

Cran: cranning or popping of the uilleann pipe is similar to staccato playing, except that the notes need not be sharply accented or emphasized. The chanter is closed on the knee momentarily eliminating the need for gracenotes for dividing purposes.

 

The flute player will have to show me, now I can't even think of crumb cake.

Edited by Mark Evans
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Alan, Just curious, did she win it in the general concertina competition or in the miscellaneous instrument side ...

Bill,

 

She was a junior All Ireland Concertina Champion several times in the 1970s, back when the Anglo was being played in a much simpler & more traditional style.

 

I've mentioned it before, but I'll say it again: Irish players have tended to play whatever they could get their hands on in years gone by, and I know of several "English" players in Co.Clare (and some English ones too). Madeleine's older sisters played fiddle, and her parents wanted to get her something different; it so happened that the concertina they found was an old Scates English system.

 

BTW, I hope Stephen recovers quickly; whatever he has, I hope it is not too serious.

Thanks Bill, I've got shingles, which I wouldn't wish on anybody, and which means I can't do much at the moment (and it's why I've only been making short posts). But at least it's a lot better than the other possibilities the doctor was worried about, before the rash appeared (he even gave me an ECG to check my heart).

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There are 70 or 80 years worth of recordings of Irish Music on the Anglo from William Mullaly (sp?) up through the current crop of players.

As I've often said, I'd consider Mullaly's playing unrepresentative of what people were generally playing in Ireland at the time (German 20-key concertinas, on the straight row), and then there's a gap of nearly 50 years before commercial recordings were made of any other Irish concertina players. But since then the style of Anglo playing has been completely changed under the powerful influence of one player, often to the detriment of those carriers of the tradition who recorded in the 70s.

 

Players of B/C accordions and C#/D accordions don't try to sound like each other..

I've heard a few who do; Dermot Byrne's name would spring to mind there, for playing a C#/D with the smoothness of a B/C, or Bobby Gardiner for playing a B/C with all the lift he used to get when he played a D/D#.

 

... and neither tried to sound like the G/Ds that preceded them in the Music.

If you mean D/Gs, then they have never been used by Irish players, and only became popular in England after the B/C had become predominant in Irish circles, there's a post here about their introduction. But G/C boxes were played in Ireland. :huh:

 

For that matter, C#/D tuning also postdates B/C in Irish music, though the style is older, but played in the wrong key on C/C#, D/D# or even B/C instruments. :blink: There's a thread on Irish Button Boxes here.

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Thanks Bill, I've got shingles, which I wouldn't wish on anybody, and which means I can't do much at the moment (and it's why I've only been making short posts). But at least it's a lot better than the other possibilities the doctor was worried about, before the rash appeared (he even gave me an ECG to check my heart).

So that's why you've been absent from 'History'. My sympathies - I had it when about 18, and the urge to scratch was murder, as well as the 'needles in the flesh' sensations. Have they invented anything better than Calamine lotion yet?

 

More on subject (??) - can we have a parallel thread "Playing English music on an Irish 'tina" to wind up Chris Timson?

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I have had some very nice Irish music recordings in from Tim Jennings, so I am not quite so panicky about it.

I already have other Irish music recordings,so with other players also being investigated, we shall hopefully finish up with what we we want.

Al

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