jdms
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Posts posted by jdms
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My Holiday ended a few days ago in a blaze of lights and latkes. I got a warm pair of socks and had my family together.
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Your latkes were blazing? That's unfortunate. Did you use too much oil?
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My guess is Marien directly translated the Dutch expression 'een vreemde eend'.
That is indeed what I did Peter
For those not familiar to dutch phrases: "een vreemde eend in de bijt" is something like "the odd man out".
...not unlike the English-language "odd duck," though that has more of a connotation of "weirdo" to my mind...
Duck calls and other novelty buttons seem to be limited to Anglos, or we could look for something along those lines here.
[edited to remove an egregious typo]
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................Just to back up a bit.
Steve said "as has already been mentioned it is traditionally performed to the Appalachian tune Maud Karpeles put to it. "
All I've ever been able to find out was that Ms.Karpeles collected the tune in Massachusetts. Any info to suggest it is a tune from that area ?
Robin
From what I gather reading the sources cited earlier, she collected it in Vermont, not Massachusetts. Neither is anywhere near the Appalachians. But who knows? Maybe her source said it was an Appalachian tune...
Well, not quite: the range runs from Maine to Georgia--the Berkshires in Massachusetts and the Green Mountains in Vermont are both part of the Appalachian chain. It's true that neither Massachusetts nor Vermont is anywhere near the area generally understood to be Appalachia (WV, western VA, eastern NC, western TN and KY), though.
jdms (nitpicker extraordinaire)
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Others on this forum (particularly Ben) will have better information than mine, but there are definitely concertina makers in South Africa, notable among them Koot Brits and Willie van Wyk, if memory serves (I don't know of any websites for either, but their contact information is in some thread or other: plugging those names into the forum search tool might be helpful). A great deal of Wheatstone's postwar Anglo production (including my own 40-button instrument, purchased from the aforementioned Ben) went to South Africa as well. As for cheaper, well...when I was in the process of buying my Wheatstone, I also considered a 40-button Koot Brits that Ben had available for the same price. It was a good price--a bargain, even--but I wouldn't call it cheap. You might or might not be able to get a better bargain with your in-country connections, but even if you can, it's not a route I'd follow for starting out.
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See the words and dots and abc in the attachment.
Ah, excellent, and thanks--I've wanted to find the Welsh words for a while (ever since I found out it was Welsh, nine years ago) but have never actually tried to find them.
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It's just the one hall...
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...unfortunately I prevaricated too long about asking for a PX and it went back on Ebay and was sold.
This is thoroughly off-topic, but I'm not good at keeping my mouth shut when issues of vocabulary crop up: I believe the word you want there is "procrastinated." I can see how too much prevarication would be a problem in this situation, but only because a seller would (rightly) refuse to trust a chronic prevaricator.
Being an Anglo player and entirely lacking in experience with duets, I can offer you no advice on your actual question--just maunderings about word choice, welcome or welcome not.
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There aren't any on the Instruments In Stock page at the moment, but the Button Box sells Clovers. I'm pretty sure I've seen Morses on the showroom shelf every time I've been there, regardless of whether there are any listed on the website, so maybe they have a Clover or two available for testing as well (of course, they make the Morses right there but have to import the Clovers from the State of Washington...).
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It may be a bit unrealistic to expect "fiddle" to be well-defined. The word derives from the same root as "violin." that is, "fiddle" is to "viol" as "vittles" is to "victuals."
Hadn't heard that before--the parallel isn't exact, though, since "fiddle" and "viol," unlike "vittles" and "victuals," aren't pronounced the same way. I've always assumed that "vittles" derived from "victuals," rather than the case of parallel evolution you describe.
But: I'm fairly certain I read somewhere--it might have been in Dan Worrall's The Anglo-German Concertina, but I can't swear to it and haven't the time to look it up--that "fiddle" used to be a generic term for the dance musician's instrument, regardless of whether strings and a bow were involved. Of course, that doesn't mean that the word didn't start out as it is now, used almost solely to describe violins...
[edited for clarity]
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Chris, the instruments in question are examples of Model 7A, which appears on the price lists collected here from 1950 forward. The 1950 list mentions Aeolas (saying they're available with tortoiseshell or amboyna ends at extra cost) but doesn't specify which instruments they are. The 1955 list places has English, duets, that same mention of Aeolas and then Anglos, which does suggest that only English and duet concertinas may be Aeolas. The 1956 and 1965 lists, however, definitely use the Aeola name for Model 7A Anglos.
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...I have a medium quality Lachenal with mental buttons...
It is perhaps unfair to pick on typos (especially if you take into account the he-who-is-without-sin thing with stones and casting thereof), but I still like the idea of a mental-buttoned instrument. Maybe Professor Harold Hill would use it for his Think method of musical instruction...
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Sidesqueeze, I bought a similar instrument from Ben a few years ago and am continuing to find it very fine indeed (though circumstances--mostly a fourteen-month-old son and smallish living quarters--are reducing my practicing time). Cost-cutting did reduce Wheatstone's quality in the 1950s, but this is an Aeola--top of the line. I've had no problem with any increased noisiness from its action over the riveted action in my Morse Ceili (or an earlier Wheatstone, not that I've much experience with any such). Wheatstone kept the traditional dovetailed reedpan for Aeolas--I think only for Aeolas, though the better-informed will no doubt correct me if I'm wrong--although (as Ben and Alex mention above) with alumin(i)um shoes. This, as Alex also mentions, means that it's lighter than a concertina with brass-shod reeds: my 40-button Wheatstone, with its 80 reeds, is nearly as light as my (30-button) Morse Ceili, an instrument noted for its lightness (I haven't weighed either, but I don't notice any difference in switching from one to the other).
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The Button Box is a well-respected business in the free reed community, and their Rochelle deal is indeed the real thing--of course, you must start with a new Rochelle from them, and the upgrade must be to a Morse (the BB's proprietary brand). You can get the same deal from Wim Wakker's Concertina Connection (manufacturer of the Rochelle) to the CC's Clover anglo or one of the high-zoot Wakkers, or, I'm fairly certain, from Bob Tedrow to one of his instruments--as I understand it, though, you can only upgrade where you buy (so no buying from the Button Box and then upgrading to a Tedrow, for example).
For my part, I found getting started on the Anglo fairly easy, though of course it takes work to make any progress from there. Others may have some suggestions for trying out some instruments; I'm too far away to be helpful in that regard, so I'll just bid you welcome to the wonderful world of the concertina and wish you good fortune.
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And I just bought "House Dance" this past weekend from the Button Box at NESI. Great so far (barely scratched the surface), though I will need a while to digest it as I also bought Betram Levy's new book! Here's to a long winter!
Ken
That's good, Ken--if you've only barely scratched the surface of the CD-ROM, it should still play.
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Thanks for advice.
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Do I now need to play the melody on the right only and start to learn the appropriate chords on the left, ie just like a keyboard?
Can't help you there, I'm not an Anglo player.
So what do you do on an EC when the melody moves from one side to the other?
A bit hasty with our assumptions, aren't we?
I almost responded "He can't help you there either, he's not an English player," but I figured it'd be better to leave any such reply to you...
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Not a helpful response, but the thread title immediately go me thinking "Oh, the hard times of old England / In old England many hard times."
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This might be "Hymn to Red October," a full choral-orchestral arrangement of which was played over the opening credits, I think. Here it is; the bit starting at 1:25 sounds similar to what you're after.
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.Parliament in Ottawa, Ontario sells mini versions of the gargoyle concertina player which is attached to the outside of the building and which you really have to look at to make out that it is holding a concertina.
for another view of the Ottawa gargoyle, see my "avatar" just below my name in the column to the left.
...thought that looked familiar.
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Does your friend know the difference between a concertina and a button accordion?
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...I have in hand the volume in question, It is titled "Folk Song USA, 111 favorite ballads and musical arrangements for piano and guitar. Collected and arranged by John A. and Alan Lomax, Musical arrangements by Charles and Ruth Seeger...
...Pete Seeger's father and stepmother. Also, to be more on-topic (since she plays the EC), Peggy Seeger's parents.
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I think one of the Edgleys is actually a Morse Robin.
Why punctuation is important: I spent about a minute wondering what a Morse Robin is, since I've only ever heard of the Ceili, Albion and Geordie...
(Not to pick on you, Paul--I'm just being amused at myself for forgetting who started this thread.)
[edited to remove a superfluous ellipsis...]
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If the problem you're having is an error message somewhere along the lines of "You're not allowed to post a file with that ending," what's tripping you up is that the url doesn't end in a recognized image file format suffix like .tif or .jpg (this was the problem I had in linking from Flickr and Facebook). What I did was view the page source--depending on your browser, it might work better to do so from a menu command or by right-clicking with your mouse. I right-clicked on the image and selected View Page Source (running Firefox on an elderly Macintosh). I could then find a url for the photo that ended in .jpg (this was the only way I could work out to find that url); pasting that in the url field after clicking on the Insert Image button above (just to the right of the Insert Link button) worked, as they say, a treat.
Joshua
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Clearly a matter of differing opinions--I'd have said that one-quarter to one-third of one's income is indeed a substantial fraction of it. But then, I'd also be apt to use "a substantial fraction," "a good part" and "a significant proportion" interchangeably in this context.
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I recently encountered something analogous in a painting by Edward Bourne-Jones, who predates the Photoshop era. The attached detail of his painting "The Lament" shows a fretless zither of unique type....
Cheers,
John
Perhaps a (non-bowed) psaltery, or a medieval dulcimer?
Christmas concertina sighting!
in General Concertina Discussion
Posted
David, I use a Firefox extension called Stealthy which does the same job as Ex-Pat Shield for Macs. They also have a version for Chrome, but not, as far as I can find, IE.