Ivan Viehoff

Cycling through the small town of Amares near Braga in northern Portugal, we saw some posters that indicated we had just missed a concert by “As Concertinas do Homem”. This literally means “The Concertinas of Man”, but clearly referred to the nearby river Homem, which runs through the neighbouring town of Terras do Bouro. Closer examination of the publicity material showed a quartet of button accordions, rather than what we call concertinas. A few days later we were in St George’s Castle in Lisbon. On a temporary stage a button accordion quartet were rehearsing for a concert. The long weekend 10-13 June 2005 includes a double public holiday for both the Portuguese National Day (Camões Day) and the Feast Day of St Anthony of Padua, or St Anthony of Lisbon as he is locally known (he was born in Lisbon), and which is a big street party and public concert weekend in the old parts of Lisbon. This quartet was called Danças Ocultas. One of the players had a very large bass instrument, with bellows that open at least 1.5m (5 feet) wide – I counted 33 folds on a publicity photo. They were playing a mix of Portuguese trad, oompah, and some unusual modern music played from scores. They also made use of pitchless sighing noises perhaps made by pressing hard with an air button partly open - or maybe it was a trick that depends on the amplification mikes. Some additional instruments (double bass, guitar and cross-between-lute-and-guitar) and a vocalist also joined in for some pieces. This web-page has some photos and details about their instruments, but unfortunately not a shot of the bellows fully extended.Rootsworld Dancas Ocultas Fans of names-that-are-accidentally-rather-naughty-in-other-languages will be pleased to know that Quim Barreiros, a Portuguese folk singer, is still touring the small towns of central Portugal, where I first picked up a publicity card for one of his concerts over 10 years ago.

People seeking to learn duet concertinas of any system largely have to teach themselves with minimal assistance from prepared teaching materials. Jeffries Duet is probably the least played of the four main Duet concertina systems, because it has such odd fingering. May I suggest you first look at the Maccann Duet website www.maccann-duet.com, where you will at least find Brian Hayden's "all systems" beginner duet concertina materials, and David Cornell's general duet concertina materials, and some fingering charts. You will probably find the older teaching materials reproduced on the site (mainly Maccann system) of not much use if you already have basic chord/key knowledge from playing the piano. In terms of push/pull and air control, a Duet has the same technique as an English system concertina, so you could flick through some English system teaching materials. There are some thoughts on this (for free) on the Concertina Connection website, but I think some people violently disagree with what is said there.

Certainly not for me. As buyer I was not even a member of ebay when I phoned the telephone number he provided, so they have got nothing on me. I agree with your interpretation "shouldn't" as far as the seller is concerned, ie in contrast to "mustn't". He hasn't actually broken the explicit prohibition on outside email communication, which I see in those words. The other things appear to be discouraged rather than explicitly prohibited, though maybe there are some more words somewhere else. If you happened to be in a concertina dealer's premises, some long distance from home, able to inspect the goods that the dealer had placed on ebay, (basically the situation I was in with this bike, which is even more inconvenient to post) it seems unlikely that you and the dealer would feel constrained from making a deal.

In what sense is this unethical, he asks, having just bought a bicycle in such fashion, and not feeling in the least guilty about it.

What's going on in a folk session? There are some, indeed lots, of people playing the tune, and tehre are some chord instruments playing the chords. If you know the tune, you play the tune. If you know the chords, you can play that, or busk a bass line, and generally there is only one chord a bar. If you put together a group of random orchestral instruments, there just isn't a classical repertoire that can be busked like that. Of course people do have "classical jam sessions", but on the basis of puttng together something resembling an ensemble which the classical repertoire expects, and those people having knowledge of the relevant repertoire, and/or being given music to play. When I was singing in a choir at [high] school, if the choir went out to enjoy themselves we would end up singing choral things standing on rocks, top of castle towers, etc. But we sang things we knew, and we would feel we couldn't do it if the people present didn't bear some approximation to a balanced choir. When I go and visit my friends who play piano/sing to roughly same standard as me, we sing at the piano. When a string quartet gets together, they'll have fun playing the string quartet repertoire. If you have an orchestra together, they'll have fun and a few missing or extra probably won't matter too much. I had a madrigal party once. I tried very hard, and succeeded in putting together two to each part plus a couple of extras. We all turned up with a copy of the same book of madrigals. We could only sing a subset of the songs in the book that actually reasonably matched our forces. And quite a few were too difficult for us to sight-read. But we ate roast goose, drank the finest Barolo, and sang a lot. I think basic issue is that western classical music grew out of a tradition of polyphony (blending of tunes artfully put together, sounding terrible if anyone departs from the planned construction). So it tends to be carefully composed for a specific ensemble. And then the players tend to be given a specific part to play, often without showing them the rest of the music.

May I just say I approve of OMRLP policy on tapirs. When I was a student, our college adopted a tapir at the Cotswold Wildlife Park, and my sister made me a cuddly tapir in the colours of the college scarf - puce and white. We called it Hugh Mungus. Unfortunately you have no candidates in my constituency. It could possibly be said that our sitting Conservative MP (a refreshingly endangered species in recent elections), whose views are somewhere to the right of David Blunkett, is at least monstrous, but I'm not voting for her. It won't make any difference though.

A professional economist writes. It is not an entirely satisfactory situation when vintage concertinas in perfect playing condition sell for much less than a modern equivalent new-build, because it means that there will be little or no modern equivalent new-build, as remains the case for many types of concertina, especially the better english and duets. Of course cheap prices for old concertinas are satisfactory for those who desire bargains, getting things for less than their construction cost. We can all wish that things that we want are so undesirable or unknown to the rest of the world that we can get them for practically nothing. We also all wish that few other tourists know our favourite spots, and that such places were not so remote. And that our favourite pubs had enough people for atmosphere but not so many that we can't get a seat. And that those delicious cheap wines I used to buy were still dirt cheap, and that someone would mend my bike for small change. The availability of the quality new-build accordion-reeded (mainly Anglo) concertina makes them a good substitute for many vintage instruments, as far as many performers are concerned. It is no accident that new-build makers concentrate on Anglos, the second-hand market suggesting much stronger demand for Anglos. But also the mid-price new-build techniques are far more suited to Anglos, because of the smaller number of reeds. It has been suggested elsewhere in this forum that these new builds are acting as a constraint on the price inflation of mid-range vintage Anglo concertinas. This can only be a good thing as far as both performers and those who have a sentimental attachment to antiques, or who enjoy their craftsmanship, are concerned. New-build concertinas would not be available, or barely available, if equivalent quality vintage instruments were still far cheaper, as they used to be. I think it is far better that several makers are able to make a living from making concertinas (better than mass-produced low-end models), than that it was uneconomic to do so. Though the economics of new-build construction at mid-price currently holds up much better for Anglo concertinas than English/Duet, with their larger number of reeds, so most new-build construction will remain heavily concentrated on Anglo. At the top end of the market, most vintage instruments remain far cheaper than their potential modern replacements. It has been suggested that the top quality modern makers do not even obtain a very good living, and getting an instrument out of them is as much a favour as a commercial transaction. People buying those vintage instruments, especially English/Duet are still getting a big bargain, because no one can make an equivalent quality instruments remotely to that cost. What I do find a little galling is that several unique concertinas are locked up in the Horniman collection, possibly not even in playable state, and not played. Though in some cases perhaps they are too unique to be played. That feeling has nothing to do with price.

Assuming you are in Britain, one likely possibility is booklice (alias psocids). Although often described as pale yellow or brown, a couple of people I know who have had them have described them as white. You will find a picture of one here (under psocoptera) assorted insects but you may need a good magnifying glass to see yours to see if they look similar, as they are 1-2mm. Booklice commonly infest damp cupboards, corners and cellars where they eat paper, cardboard, flour, cornflakes, tin labels, clarinet cases, etc. The best solution for booklice is to remove the source of dampness, though you will want to apply an insecticide to get rid of most of them in the first place. Make sure that the case is thoroughly dry and kept in a warm dry place, so not in a cold corner or cold cupboard where condensation or rising damp might be a problem. If, for example, you have booklice in a damp cupboard and for whatever reason it is not possible to dry it out they are reported to be practically impossible to get rid of, since they will eat the cupboard as well as the contents. Another possibility is what you are seeing is some kind of small moth or micro-moth whose larvae are chewing the case or its lining, and the moths have suddenly emerged now spring is here. Such moths are usually about 10mm across, which isn't what I would call very small, but someone else might. Mothballs are good for deterring such creatures from arriving, but only when they haven't already moved in. You might need something like woodworm treatment to get rid of them if they are in the wood, rather than just eating the lining.

The Germans make English ch- as tsch- , hence Tschechoslowakien in German. The Czechs called their former country Československo, and their present country Česko. For some reason, as you say, the English adopted a Polish-ised spelling. The Germans have no difficulty calling CR Tschechien, and (having two Czechs in the house at present) I often call it Czechia to save awkwardness - I wish we could adopt in more generally. Respellings of names are quite common in that part of the world. The common name "Black" is Schwarz in German, Černy in Czech and Czerny in Polish. These are commonly seen respelled as Švarc in CR, Szwarc in Poland, and Tscherny in Germany. A Czech might adopt a Polish spelling in Germany, as the Germans wouldn't have the accents on their typewriters, and are familiar with Polish-looking spellings. I know an Australian from the Hungarian-speaking area of Slovakia; she calls herself as she is on her Slovak birth certificate, Kováčová, derived from the Hungarian name Kovács, respelled in Slovak with a Slovak female ending added; but the Australians registered her (at their insistence) as Kovac, and she is always a bit worried someone might complain that her two passports have slightly different names.

Something starting Cze- does suggest Czech, but oddly when combined with "made in Germany" it doesn't any more, except in one possible way. If something was made in Germany and rebadged for the Czech market, they wouldn't write cze- but rather če- as this is how they have been spelling things in Czech for about 500 years (as in Petr Čech the goalkeeper, čech meaning Bohemian rather than Czech). I could understand a Czech-made object being given a name starting cze- for export purposes, as Czechs are aware that their Czech special letters are not well-known abroad, but that is not what we have here. The one possible way I mentioned is that a Czech living in Germany might have respelled his name as cze- . You come across words starting cze- in Polish and Hungarian. Cegesa is an Argentinean maker of kitchen appliances.

He is, in effect, operating a Dutch auction, where the price falls until someone buys. Perhaps he doesn't like bidders seeing other bidders' bids, and this is a way of concealing it. Being an economist who has studied auction theory, I can suggest that this should not be a method of auctioning likely to work to his advantage. Concealing information reduces "confidence" in the auction, which tends to reduce average outcome, but increase the disperson of outcomes. But then some people do seem to make a good living by selling things in ways that theoretically shouldn't work to their advantage. I have in mind door-to-door selling, auctioning cuts of meat at open air markets, having "closing down sales" the moment you open up, and sending out letters telling people they have won prizes in order to sell them magazine subscriptions or holiday time-shares.

I wonder why it has such redundancy on the keyboard. On one end: The first white column is ABC The second white column is CDE The third white column is EFG The last white column is GBA So with three rows of black notes interleaved, 21 buttons provide only an octave, for which 12 buttons would have sufficed. A 42-button Crane provides three octaves with the same total number of buttons, with just 5 repeated notes. Perhaps the maker didn't have many reed sizes available. Or perhaps "wor Ivan" liked buttons in adjacent columns to go up in thirds giving some Anglo similarity. I was surprised to read that serfs were prohibited from reading in tsarist Russia. I was aware of an apparently contradictory fact that Russia was the first country to have a system of "universal" basic education: in 1786 Catherine the Great required every town and district to open a basic school. Evidently the "universality" didn't extend to the serfs. 'tother Ivan

ebay auction 7306187349 1950s Wheatstone concertina Edit I now see the answer in another thread. Don't know how to delete.

It is not about copyright licensing, nor is it specifically about music. It has been true for a long time in England and Wales (and maybe Scotland, but the law is different there), that a venue whose main function is a performance venue, such as a theatre, cinema (that's a "movie theatre" in some English dialects), or concert hall, and also places such as a disco, needs to have the appropriate licence, in addition to planning permission (that's "zoning" in some English dialects). The point is that, in this way, it is inspected by Health and Safety, and the licence is issued if they comply with fire regulations, among other things. Often also the bureaucrats have the power to make other little insistences, (We want a shrubbery... a nice one, on two levels, with a little path up the middle...) which they consider are appropriate to the safe operation of the venue in question. Of course, fires and other disasters are especially dangerous in buildings containing large crowds (cf, recent Buenos Aires disco fire, Russian army spraying nerve gas into the building). The idea of the recent legislation is to bring temporary performance venues into line with the generic performance venues, so that they have to be inspected, comply with fire regulations, and, of particular importance, pay an annual fee for the privilege. As a choral singer, I occasionally perform in churches which are not regular performance venues. In these cases the vicar may turn up to offer a prayer, and the ticket price may be redefined as a collection with suggested contribution rates. In this way, it can be called an act of worship, which is exempt from these rules. Probably you don't programme Orff's "Catulli Carmina" in such venues. When one considers that such pubs and churches may often contain just as many, indeed more, people when there isn't a "performance" as defined, you realise how completely barmy this legislation is.

Lucien Freud has just sold his latest painting at auction to an anonymous buyer for £3.8million. It is a life-size nude of Kate Moss, looking like she is lying on a meat-slab, as is his style. She "sat" (ie sprawled naked for hours) for him an extraordinary number of times, something like 50 to 100. The painting shows her in the early stages of pregnancy. Unbelievably, neither Ms Moss, nor any admirer, had actually commissioned this portrait. If I remember it right she was not even paid as a model, but "sat" merely for the honour of being painted by such an eminent painter.

And I have just discovered that Decree 101 of the Nigerian Government is going to Room 101. It gave the government control over appointments to the Nigeria Football Association, which, if exercised, is contrary to FIFA rules. Since they have exercised it, FIFA is threatening to expel them, so now they are rescinding it.

"Reykjavík 101" is a cult Icelandic film, about the intertwined love-lifes of a selfish young waster, and, er..., his mother. 101 is the postcode of a trendy district of central Reykjavík. Recommended viewing (if you are into that kind of thing). The unfunny TV programme "Room 101" takes its name from the Orwell novel.

I once went into a house like that, except it was full of bicycles. Every room contained bicycles. Some rooms had bicycles completely occupying the available floor space. The living room was fitted out as a gym, and the ceiling was hung with bicycle wheels. Ledges were covered in lighting systems and spare parts. He had to lean over a couple of bicycles up against the cooker make me a cup of tea. He even had a bicycle in the bath.... He also had a lock-up garage full of them and twenty-odd more rusting in the garden. His divorce was surprising only to the extent that someone had married him in the first place. My partner and I only have seven bicycles, and they are only allowed in the house when they are ill.

This, of course, is the famous "One Song to the Tune of Another" game as played on the BBC radio game show "I'm Sorry I Haven't a Clue", hosted by jazz legend Humphrey Lyttleton, which has now been running for 30 years or so. (This is the show where they also play the transport themed radio board game "Mornington Crescent", the rules of which are a closely guarded secret.) As Michael implies, the underlying concept of the "One Song to the Tune of Another" game is exceptionally difficult to explain, but somehow people get the hang of it despite Hump's explanations. Warning: don't listen to this show while driving. I know. I nearly had an accident when the (late lamented) Willie Rushton attempted to sing "I did it my way" to the tune of a George Formby song.

I can tell from your motto you also have similar tastes to my girlfriend. Even if she does call my concertina an instrument of torture.

It is also easy to confuse the Coventry Carol with other "lulling" carols, such as "Myn Lyking" (Lullay, my liking, my dear son, my sweeting, Lullay my dear son, mine own dear darling) and "Sing lullaby". For some reason I tend to mix up the latter with "The angel Gabriel", perhaps because they both have one-line refrains. "The angel Gabriel" is, I believe, a Basque carol. The authentic Coventry carol has a mix of triple and duple timing - recent editors sometimes "regularise" it to triple time, which loses the character. Of the above, I am particularly fond of "Myn Lyking", as set by Holst in the Oxford Carol Book. There is a little known, beautiful, very early lulling carol on one of the Gothic Voices disks, in the style of a border ballad, which comes out something like: Lullay, lullay, lay, lay, lullay, mi dere moder sing lullay. Als I lay i yoolis nicht, alane in mi longing Me thocht i saw a well fair sicht, a maid hir child lulling. Lullay &c. Ic a moder, said the child, and tell what sall me befall Hereafter whan i com till eld, for so doen moders all. Lullay &c. and so on for about 20 verses On the Gabriel theme, I adore "Angelus ad Virginem". It comes in versions with flattened or sharpened leading notes. I have no idea whether the flattened leading notes and mediaeval cadences are authentic, or whether they have put in by modern arrangers who are trying to make it sound more mediaeval, but I prefer it like that! But my vote for my favourite carol has to be for "There is no rose of such virtue, as is the rose that bear Jesu, etc". All sorts of people (Britten etc) have written their own tune to these words, but there is an original mediaeval version, which I have in a little booklet of mediaeval carols edited by Denis Stevens.

It is true that in England folk music is highly "unfashionable", and therefore largely indulged in by people who don't care much for fashion, who are perhaps largely of a certain age. In contrast, in places like Ireland and Argentina folk music is more equally valued to what the locals might consider "international popular" music, perhaps in part because of the popularity of dancing to the traditional music. Paradoxically, young English people go travelling to places like Ireland and Argentina in part to experience the local folk music. Hence "world music", meaning everyone's folk music but our own, is more "fashionable". But why should this have anything to do with concertinas? Did our Victorian forebears invent the concertina in order to play pre-Victorian folk music on it? I don't think so. If the concertina was later adopted by folk music players, then that was just a matter of convenience, like the adoption of the Spanish guitar, and the later adoption of more recent inventions (electric instruments, etc) by later folk "rock" and "fusion" players. We should not confuse "authentic" with "unamplified". If we now think that the concertina is a quintessential folk music instrument, then I rather suspect that is because its use is greatly diminished in other forms of music. Ivan (age 42)

An economist writes... Reneging on bids is a well known problem in auction theory, with some infamous real life examples, such as an Australian auction of TV licences that lost a minister his job: bidders applied bidding rules to the letter to (a) make lots of different bids, and then ( renege costlessly on all the bids they made, apart from those ones which were just sufficient to beat the surviving opposition. The standard solution to the reneging bid problem is to force bidders to put up a deposit related to the maximum size of bid they are permitted to make (the sum of all outstanding bids), for example, 5% of their maximum amount of all outstanding bids would be typical for an auction for goods, and much larger deposits (30%, even 100%) are required in certain other cases, such as government concessions and commodity futures. Bidders will still occasionally walk away from their bids, but it becomes much more painful for them to do so, and the auctioneer gets the deposit in full or partial compensation for having to resell. Examples of painful deposits retained: National Express Group walked away from a deposit of about $AU150million when they discovered that they had overbid for a concession to run some Melbourne commuter rail services; and a consortium including BT walked away from a deposit of several hundred million euros they had put on an auction for an Italian mobile phone licence, when the consortium became unable to agree on their next move. I can understand why ebay doesn't want to go down the line of requiring deposits from bidders, as then it would then get much more deeply involved in the transaction, in the way that, for example, Christies and Sotheby's are (charging about 25% commission), but ebay is not. Reserves are a tricky business. Set it high, and it might not sell and you still have to pay ebay commission; set it low and you might have to sell it cheap. So it's a rough world in ebay's giant car boot sale. There is no costless way of dealing with rogue bids. The seller here discovered the risk of cancelling a rogue bid late in the auction: you end up going back to a low bid with little time to drum up business in genuine bids, and the genuine bidders are confused by an auction that seems to be going backwards. The alternatives are (a) let the fake bid stand - when the bidder doesn't pay you lose the sale, but you can still try to sell it again, though you might suffer from some unpleasantness at the hands of the fake bidder trying to get the goods out of you without paying, etc, ( refuse to sell the concertina to the final bidder, on the grounds of the prior hanky-panky, though this could have other unpleasant costs (reputation, ebay penalties). Any other suggested strategies?

That wasn't the kind of "logic" I had in mind, Wes. I was thinking more of the logic of how people in that part of the world put words together, even with nonce meanings. For example, in English, with a word like insonification, the "-ification"/"-ify" is a normal way of extending a word (linguists call it a "productive" ending, meaning people are still making new words that way). This derives from an imitative process in late Latin, in which words like clarificare=clarify (from clarus=clear)were constructed by analogy with words magnificare=magnify, mistaking this as coming from magnus=big, though in fact it came from magnificus=magnificent, but helped along the way by the fact that -ficare/-fictum sound rather like facere=make and fictum=confected (hence fiction), riding on the fact that facere has irregular vowel changes (eg fecit=he made) (though fictum is from fingere). Here the "in-" means "into" (as in injection), rather than "not" (as in insane). Observe that in latinate languages "in-" can normally mean "not" only when, at the original time of prefixing, it was stuck onto an adjective (in+sanus); if it was originally stuck onto a verb it is normally going to mean "into", though of course we then later make nouns and adjectives out of the original verb (in+iacere -> inicere -> injectum -> injection). This results in the terrible confusion over inflame = flare up vs inflammable = non-flammable. We in English/German can stick in- on nouns to make, eg, insight, but I am not aware of that being normal in Latinate languages. Here we derive insonification from in+son+ify. I can't exclude the possibility that there is a sound meaning or pun here. There are surprising irregularities which occasionally challenge my preconceptions, and the Spanish word for sound is one of them. If I wanted to construct a concept like "sounding", remembering that to sound is an -ar verb (Sp sonar, Pt soar, Lat/It sonare), I would come up with something like sonanza or soança, with -a-. Observe that from Italian sonare we have the past participle sonato, which gives us sonata. This is very normal, and latinate words are remarkably faithful at preserving -a- in derivations from -are verbs and -i/e- in derivations from -i/ere verbs. However, oddly, the Spanish word for sound has -i-, sonido. And since a -d- between two vowels is pronounced faintly if at all in Spanish, especially towards the end of a word, it is hardly surprising that sonio turns up as an occasional misspelling (in fact when I found a reference to an Ingeniero de Sonio, a sound engineer, it took me a little while to convince myself that this is misspelling, possibly becoming established in Sp sound engineering circles; but we find it more often spelt correctly - ingeniero de sonido - and it hasn't made it into the dictionary). Where could this -ido come from? A -d- in that situation normally represents a -t- in latin, so is there putative <sonito>? In fact sonito is a word in Italian, (accented on first syllable), meaning a small sound, a murmuring, because -ito is a diminuitive ending. So I can only think that the Spanish have taken the word straight from the diminuitive. Or perhaps the diminuitive became established as the "politer" word (this is common Lat Am Spanish, where you should be careful to use diminuitives to avoid giving offence, eg, viejito - oldish, is politer than viejo - really old), and the original was then lost as too vulgar; so perhaps the -t- became -d- alongside similar sound changes. It must have been diminuitive fairly early, because -ido is not a productive diminuitive ending in Spanish today, rather -ito/a (eg chiquita = little girl). But of course we are interested in Galcian, not Spanish, and Gal/Pt never got that odd -ido/ito ending on their word for sound, though of course Galicians are heavily exposed to Spanish in everyday life. But it set me thinking - perhaps someone would form a diminuitive sonillo, because -illo (or -ilho in Pt) is a common diminuitive (eg, cigarillo). And since -ll/lh- is rather weak, it isn't implausible that might come out as sonio. (Though this isn't a dictionary word). This would be accented on -i-, rather than accent on -o- which characterises insomnia meanings. This provides a test - if the word turns up in the song does it accent on the 2nd syllable, or the 3rd? And what about that in-? In- isn't normally a noun prefix. If I'm going to start with a putative <inso[n]ar>, I'm not going to get to insonio, because it takes me in the inso[n]-a- direction. I only found a way to sonio because I started with son. And that's why I think insonio isn't a very likely "constructed" word from son. But I'm prepared to be told I'm wrong.

I just had a quick look at the songs you are currently singing - Brahms Wiegenlied and Schumann's Lotosblume. As well as being really lovely songs, they look just the right kind of thing for concertina arrangement - simple songs with unpretentious accompaniment. Though the Schumann looks a touch daunting to me as it modulates in to a remote key on the way through. This gave me some further thoughts of Good Songs that look suitable for concertina arrangement - you can preview them all (and listen) via the links I gave above: Brahms : Sonntag, Sandmannchen Schubert : Heidenroslein, Standchen D957, Das Wandern, Das Fischermadchen (and lots more) Butterworth :Loveliest of trees, When the lad for longing sighs, When I was one and twenty, With rue my heart is laden Fauré: Apres un reve Schumann: First four in Dichterliebe (Im wunderschonen.., Aus meinen tranen..., Die rose..., Wenn ich...)