David Barnert

My usual advice to this question is find out what kind of concertina the person was playing when you were first inspired to get one, and get one of those.

Here you go: I found it (fortunately in time to hear it live) by searching youtube for “Cindy Harris Autoharp.”

All I get is eight and a half minutes of sound checks, whether I watch in the panel above or click the youth.be link in Jody’s email. Reloading the page gets me the same thing.

Worth noting that a variant of Parson's Farewell appears in Michael Praetorius’s “Terpsichore,” which was published in Germany in 1612, but contains many French tunes.

Here’s some photos of a Peacock posted yesterday. It looks like the hand rest is below the bottom row by about 5 times the distance between the rows. The distance between the rows is 9mm, according to Brian’s specs (which the Peacock, unlike the Stagi adheres to). So about 45 mm.

Just type “katyusha sheet music” into google images. Hundreds of examples to choose from.

Yes, Brian Hayden was very specific about the slant of the keys in relation to the hand rail: The Stagi folks had no access to this specification when they cobbled together their instrument.

Also mentioned in that thread (4 posts up from yours) is Brian’s:

I have taken this part of the conversation to a different thread. But (staying on topic) I would remind you that if you were less averse to thinking about music in a theoretical sense (ie., how the different notes of a scale relate to each other, the expectations they set up, how they are resolved) you might be less plagued by questions like the one that started this thread. For instance, your Shepherd's Hey notation has an F# where there should be a D in the last bar. See https://themorrisring.org/sites/default/files/sheetmusic/longboroughShepherdsHey.pdf

In another thread, Adrian wrote: Yes, that’s exactly what I was trying to say all along. Actually, the “ledger lines” aspect hadn’t occurred to me. I think the range of low D to high g comes from ease of playing on commonly available instruments (fiddle, penny whistle, soprano recorder, tabor pipe, with the middle two sounding an octave higher and the last sounding two octaves higher). I’d be more inclined to believe that the placement of the G clef comes from the desire to minimize ledger lines in music whose pitch was fixed.

Yes, in the church context, it is limited to tunes with a range of one octave. Most Morris tunes (and contradance tunes and Playford tunes and fiddle tunes in general) have a range from D to g an octave and a half higher. Still, the authentic/plagal dichotomy helps to differentiate D tunes in that range (the low note is root of the scale) and G tunes (the low note is 5th of the scale).

Might be a good time to introduce the concept of “authentic” tunes and “plagal” tunes. The difference is how low in pitch the range of the tune extends. Authentic tunes go down to the root note of the key as the lowest note of the tune. These tunes are often written/played in D. Plagal tunes bottom out on the fifth note of the scale and are often written/played in G. So in both cases, they have the same range (from low D up to usually the G an octave and a half above). This makes a lot of sense to a pennywhistle or pipe & tabor player. On a fiddle it keeps the melody on the top three strings, reserving the bottom G string for drones and bass notes. Tunes in F or A are usually plagal, while tunes in Bb are usually authentic. Go figure.

Here is the advice I got from Bob Snope at the Button Box earlier this year.

They do. All the same, my concertina could use some work and I was thinking of driving it over there, as my days are so empty lately. Looks like we’re both about 1-3/4 hours from the BB.

Let’s see... In 1989, Rich Morse (who founded the Button Box and developed the line of concertinas that bear his name) ordered two 55-key Aeola Haydens to be made simultaneously, and put down a $200 deposit on each. A year later, he offered me one of them, so I paid him $200 and bought in on the deposit. In 1992, Rich and I both paid an additional $1400 (£740 at the time). We were told to expect delivery in the Fall of 1992. Over the years since, I have not paid any more money, and I heard from Dickinson once, asking me if I wanted wooden or metal ends. Rich, hoping it would speed things along, ultimately paid full price for his. Neither of us ever saw an instrument. Rich died in 2009. Also, nothing ever came of the Russian project, although a photograph of a prototype was circulated.