wes williams

More symphoniums can be found on the Concertina Museum website. The photos on the right hand side will scroll if you put your mouse pointer over them, and you can see the insides.

And a few words from Brian himself http://www.concertina.com/williams/hayden-chat/index.htm

I found a copy in the Wayback Machine: https://web.archive.org/web/20150303120725/http://www.concertina.net:80/ww_pitch.html Isn't it strange how these things come back to haunt you? At the time I wrote that I hadn't realised that cents were logarithmic. It just shows how much more is now available on the net, and how much more we now know. But I'm quite chuffed that Dolmetsch quoted me and re-used the table.

Randy Merris says c.1898 - see item D9 here

No, I'm not ont' commitee any more. The ICA has an extensive archive of paper stuff that I scanned up and put online before I left. But I also have one or two tapes of Ken in my personal archive. I think one was published by a Morris side, so may still be available.

Malcolm's link is to my site, so I'll add a few more comments. I now have many more release dates for these recordings, and Lumbering Luke was released by Edison-Bell (EB) on a wax cyinder (so pre gold moulded) in 1903 or 1904. There was no copyright until 1912, so this recording could have been 'taken' from the EB one, a practice that was widespread in those early days. Pirate audio arrived long before the internet If you want to hear Prince more clearly, go to the 'Audio' section, and then the Alexander Prince section. The last few recordings were made electrically and are much better fidelity, as are the later acoustic recordings. The project which is the subject of this thread is American based, so has few UK records. But it's worth reminding you that all the USA 'Victor' Prince recordings will have been made in the UK by the Gramophone Company (later HMV) and usually issued either on their 'Gramophone Concert' or 'Zonophone' labels. So the Honest Toil/Diadem record mentioned above will very likely be the recordings released on Zonophone 178 and 206 that were recorded in 1908, although Victor scrubbed out and replaced any of the English markings in the record run-outs. See here for another example.

The latest ICA 'Concertina World' magazine has just arrived, and I was saddened to see that it reports the death of John Holman back in January. For those of you not familiar with John, he was a skilled leather worker, and was responsible for the bellows and cases of the earliest Dipper concertinas back in the late 1970s/ early 1980s. A little more information can be found in this thread. I last saw John a couple of years ago, so was aware that he was battling the big C. A really nice guy, and I shall miss our chance meetings and chats in the local Wiltshire/Somerset borders area.

Many thanks Dan, I'd recently tried to access the original Journal pages (which were on Alex Holden's site) and had got 'page not found' error messages, so I was very pleased to find the announcement here, and that the Journal was still alive and had reached its first publication. I've got lots of interesting reading ahead, so thanks and congratulations to all concerned!

The last one is on a page where you find the style of the ends described on most instruments, so NP - nickel plated, black - all black 'ebonised', so maybe mag means mahogany ends?

If you haven't found it already, Chris Flint's website has a lot about Rock Chidley. All these type of concertinas are playable, but are probably brass reed, so don't have the strength of sound of the steel reed instruments. A valuation is difficult as it would depend how much work it needs to be made playable.

Peter, I can't disagree with anything you've written. Susan has already attended one of Noel's workshops, so will have picked up the basic ideas of 'across the rows'. But these workshops are fairly intensive, and you can't expect to come away having learned everything - and remembering it all. So maybe a 'refresher' for Susan might be the best idea, so anything she's misunderstood gets straightened out, and any 'bad habits' she's picked up get sorted. But as you've said, improvement is something the player has to do, and no workshop will ever provide a miracle leap in ability without a lot of effort from the player as a follow up.

Ross, The thoughts expressed by Geoff and Peter are not personal 'pet peeves'. They have been repeated by many prominent musicians over at least the past twenty years, and for all instruments in ITM. You've been a member on these forums long enough to know this. Susan, You've said "My main goal is to become a better concertina player" but it's difficut to know what 'better' might mean exactly to you. Do you want to be able to play in 'faster' sessions, or do you want to be more confident in your playing, or do you want to gain more expression in your playing, or learn to get 'inside' the tunes and make them your own, or what? If you are tending towards the starting 'OR's in that sentence above, then Noel's workshop is probably your best bet, but if you are tending towards the later 'OR's then the Catskills is probably more in your line. Whatever you choose, good luck and enjoy yourself!

Randy hasn't published any estimates as far as I know, except for a few in threads here for a particular instrument. Stephen Chambers published some original information in PICA 1, 2001 see here.

The part on the minor makers had already been updated - see here - and is now well over ten years old, so also out of date. The page originally on site here was written in 2001, and we've moved on considerably since then, for example the Wheatstone ledgers have been published and transcribed and there is an index here, as well as much more on that site, and I've also added software related to the ledgers on my site, which you can use to get some idea of instruments not in the ledgers. So Paul's removal of the page was well justified, as almost all of it was out of date. As Ken said above, I published some new estimates for Lachenal anglo dates based on dealer/repairer markings and addresses from Randall Merris's ?2005? or ?2007? database a good while ago, which was just a different way of looking at the same question. The only data not currently on the web was some predictions on Lachenal English and Duet dates based on Geoff Wooff's idea of using simple formulae. And while the English dates suggested seemed to give reasonable results, both Randy and I have decided (independently!) that the duets were initially numbered in two sets of series which joined later, so that data is out of date. I did consider reposting the page on my website when it disappeared from here, but it was so outdated I decided not to. My main research now concentrates on recordings, so maybe its time for new blood to take on this task. A new page on my website could be made available if anybody wants to volunteer

A huge amount of Baroque music is available in midi format. Find a midi to score program ( scorecloud pops up on first google as a free one) and you have an almost unlimited source of sheet music.