Steve Mansfield

Hey Bill, this isn't arguing, this is just a gentle wee discussion, with a bunch of decent folk, sharing their honest opinions on the subject. It'd be unnatural & unhealthy if we all agreed on everything, don't you think. Cheers Dick I agree Al Is this a five-minute argument or the full half-hour?

I think the anti-ITM attitude in English sessions is generally less than it was, purely because there is now a much stronger English tune session circuit and a much greater general (general as in 'amongst session musicians' anyway) awareness of English traditional music. It wasn't, in a lot of cases, anti-ITM as such: it was more a case of creating the space for playing other repertoires, and the easiest way of stating that as a session 'policy' was, to quote the Old Swan Band, 'No Reels'! Over on Mudcat there's a long thread running at the moment about ITM being played at breakneck speed, click here to go there if you're interested, although be warned at the time of typing this it's reached 174 messages and rather wandered off-piste! The general public still, in many cases, think that anything played on concertinas, squeezeboxes, flutes, fiddles etc. is automatically Irish of course, but that's another discussion completely.

A handshake is good but I'm not too sure about hugs - Victoria leaves a long shadow with us English. Ian I turned up at a friend's 60th birthday session recently and got a welcome hug - fair made the trip well worthwhile in its own right, even before I'd played any of the fine music on offer that afternoon! Mind you when I was a student & playing in sessions in Sheffield in the early 80s, you knew you'd really cracked admission into the inner circle when you got a curt nod and a 'sithee young 'un' at the end of the night ...

I have never understood why the two skills are considered as being in some form of opposition to each other. I can do both (personally I think I learnt to read music first, and then to play by ear as time went on), and both are valuable tools to have at your disposal as a musician. If you're in a session you don't want to be scrabbling around to find the sheet music for a tune whilst everyone else is already half-way through it - and if you get home from the session, find the bit of paper you scribbled the name of that tune you really liked, you can then look it up on t'Internet and learn it from the dots. I can't remember who said it, but the skill in playing traditional music from sheet music is in playing the bits between the notes. The shape of the tune is contained in the sheet music before you, but the pulse and lilt and (gulp) soul of the tune is in the stylistic nuances of timing and expression that sheet music would expend a lot of ink to convey, but your knowledge of how English (or Irish or French) music works supplies. But if you missed how that rising figure in the B part went, you can learn it from the sheet music and be ready to dive in next time that tune goes past. I'll also sometimes download books of tunes from sites like the Village Music Project and play my way through them - it's excellent practise, and it brings me into contact with tunes I might never otherwise have come across. Nobody has expressed it here, but there is a lot of snobbery amongst folk / traditional music about using the dots, as if it was some sort of barrier to authenticity or betrayal of the oral/aural tradition. I happen to think that's utter nonsense - if you can learn material by ear, AND from sheet music, you are increasing your repertoire, giving yourself greater opportunities, and making yourself a more complete musician, no matter whatever level of musicianship you are currently at.

My Wheatstone treble EC is #5892 which dates it to 1853 or 1854. It's been quite substantially restored at some point (new reproduction bellows, felting, pads etc) and so is probably good for another 150 years if I and my successors continue to look after it.

Ian's not going to have to manage on his own after all - just arrived, all the way from Wales, will you please welcome Mr. Di Atonicaccordeon

It's going to be a rowdy affair, so thank goodness the P.A. hire company are here. They know all about amplifying concertinas do the Rowfones: a father and son team, both called Michael ... so that's a Mike Rowfone for each end ...

Sorry the Duffin book didn't work out, it was an honest recommendation but, well, different folks get different things from different books in the same way we don't all like Seth Lakeman or Sigur Ros or Stravinsky. Michael, your summary is fine - and let's face it you don't need to know how we arrived at the messy compromise that is the equal temperament system to use it playing music, whether that be on fixed-tuning instruments like the concertina or on unfixed pitch instruments like the violin (and even then, habit and constant exposure since childhood to Equal Temperament [ET] trains us to hear the ET scale as correct and other tunings as incorrect). But here's my attempt at ET in a nut-shell: There are two central 'natural' harmonies, which are the octave, and the fifth: the fifth is the interval C >> G in C major, D >> A in D major etc. Those two intervals sound so 'right' because the speed of the different vibrations that make up the two notes fit together perfectly, and that is because they are perfect ratios to each other: the octave is 2:1, the fifth is 3:2. The problem is that if you use perfect fifths to tune something like a piano, the octaves eventually end up out of tune! If you tune by fifths you go C >> G >> D >> A >> E >> B >> F# >> C# >> G# >> D# >> A# >> E# >> B#. But there isn't a B# - that's C. And if you've tuned by perfect fifths, the C at the start and the B# a.k.a. C at the end are out of tune with each other. But out-of-tune octaves are horrible and very obvious - so a whole raft of compromises and carefully calculated fudges were devised down the years, whereby the octaves were pulled back in tune with each other, and the 'gap' was, instead, split up and added to various other notes in the scale instead. So we end up with the notes we have today: many of them are subtly out-of-tune from where they 'should' be, to the greater goal of being roughly in tune no matter where you start on the scale and whatever key you play in. And this still affects you no matter what instrument you play, because if my concertina was tuned to a different set of compromises to your concertina, or my flute was tuned to a different tuning system than my mate Ian's melodeon, they'd be out of tune with each other. Result - pretty much what actually did happen in the Renaissance: where instruments were made in matched consorts, played together, and woe betide anyone who tried to use a shawm made in York in a pub session with a bunch of waits from Winchester because they were very out of tune with each other (and also probably didn't even agree on what note A was, but that's whole other kettle of worms and can of fish). I'm sure there are musicologists who know far more than me who are wincing at my omissions and grave errors in the above - but that's how I understand it anyway. Hope that makes sense. Here endeth the lecture! Please don't throw me across the room ...

Excuse me if this is a daft question but surely now that sharps and flats are essentially the same, i.e., G# = Ab (unlike in the old days when they differed), then this won't matter. Or have I gone astray somewhat in my attempts to understand music, which looks easy but is not. Not a daft question at all, but one that impinges on the way that instruments are made and the way that some keys are easier than others on many instruments. Consider, if you will, the triumph of economical design and beautiful simplicity that is the tin whistle. A standard tin whistle has a 'natural scale ' of D, in that if you put all your fingers down the note is D, lift the bottom finger and you play an E, and so on. The scale of, and therefore tunes in, G is/are pretty straightforward as the fingering for a C natural is easy and fits into the general pattern of movement. Likewise A, and arguably C. Ooh, and the relative minors, so Em, Bm, Am. The further you get from the whistle's 'home' key the more complicated the fingerings, and the harder the transition from one fingering to another, gets, until you reach, oh I don't know, Ab, at which point even I as a pretty competent whistleist either pick up my EC or, if it really is Ab, I probably can't do Ab on EC either so I go to the bar and get a round in. Ignoring capos and non-standard tunings, the very way that guitars and fiddles are tuned predisposes them to keys with sharps in - fiddlers love A because the higher open strings are tuned to A and E, so they can get lovely ringing open notes and give their fingers a momentary rest. Similarly brass instruments' 'home' keys are around Bb or Eb, and while they are theoretically chromatic, in practise the further you get from the 'home' key the tougher things get. Things are even harder for many instruments, anglo concertinas being a perfect example, because they just don't have all the notes they need to play a fully chromatic scale, and so certain keys are forever denied to them. So if you're spending all your time hanging around with fiddlers and guitarists, not to mention melodeon players who are tied to G/D, then even if you've got all the notes somewhere on the keyboard you're going to be going to enormous contortions to hit them if your instrument's 'home' key is Bb or Eb. Hence, incidentally, the popularity amongst English folk musicians of the C melody saxophone. So to sum up and shut up, it's not a matter of whether (Ab = G#) or not - it's whether you can get to the note whatever you choose to call it! Glad you're enjoying Duffin's book BTW.

But I don't think the BBC has actually claimed it's a new video! In fact I don't think anyone has claimed it's a new video, it's a repeat of the first series of the Transatlantic Sessions from way back. The date on YouTube, for example, is the date the video was posted on YouTube, nothing more than that. As someone has already said, one looka tthe youthful visages of Simon Thoumire and Jim Sutherlands would rather give the game away as far as dating evidence goes. After that it's all just a case of someone grabbing hold of the wrong end of the stick and starting to beat around the bush with it ...

Based on what evidence? Most of this "pagan survival" stuff is modern speculation. As little or nothing is known of pagan religious practices (see Ronald Hutton's book "The pagan religions of the ancient British Isles") it's impossible to prove. Now, "survival of post-Enclosures demanding-money-with-menaces practices", I could believe (see Bob Bushaway's book "By Rite"). See also the books by John Forrest and John Cutting. The whole 'pagan' nonsense was introduced by a combination of denouncements from the church pulpit during the Reformation (anything the church couldn't either control or make money from was immediately branded pagan, including football!) and subsequently picked up as a truism without any evidence whatsoever. "Survival of post-Enclosures demanding-money-with-menaces practices" is just about bang on, especially for Border and Molly!

Thanks for posting it, I wouldn't have seen this otherwise.

If you're interested in finding out more, have a read of Ross Duffin's book on the subject with the splendid title 'How equal temperament ruined harmony: and why you should care'. It's part musical history, part social history, and part scientific/musicological treatise: but even if, like me, you've not got the academic musical knowledge to follow all of the more musicologically technical parts of the book it's still a fascinating read and entertainingly written. Mr Duffin also restricts his examples and discussion to Western classical music (personally I'd love to know more about the temperaments used by the Breton bagad bands or indeed by Southern English fiddlers like Jinky Wells), but he is the professor of music at some-prestigious-American-university-or-other so the classical leaning is inevitable. You can get the paperback off of Amazon for under a fiver, and it will answer all your questions (including many you didn't even realise needed asking!). Recommended.

Well, in the section of the FAQ called Repair Techniques it says (and has said since version 1.0):- Just an aside, but the otherwise esteemable Concertina Repair Manual doesn't actually cover this vital piece of information, so I was very grateful for the concertina FAQ on that point. I run the FAQ for the uk.music.folk newsgroup at http://www.lesession.co.uk/umf so I know something of what you're faced with Chris - good luck!

Hey hey hey, success. I tried the tin foil, which didn't work (but is a great tip for the future), but then gave the underneath of the reed the gentlest and ginger-ist push I could muster and it's singing like a bird. Thank you all very much indeed, virtual beer all round!

Thanks for the suggestions so far. I'll give them a go (probably Monday now) and let you know how I get on.

I'll say straight off that I've only recently summoned the courage to actually take the end off of my EC and do some basic fixes, and I'm no handyman so complex engineering is out ... A reed has gone silent on my EC - I've slid a piece of paper under the reed and that's always worked in previous cases but not this time, and the valve seems to be moving OK and certainly doesn't seem to be stuck shut. At which point Elliott's concertina repair manual starts suggesting things I don't feel remotely competent to attempt! Are there any other easy fixes I can try, or is this a case for someone who knows what they are doing to have a look at it? My baby is a Wheatstone EC, serial number 5892 so made about 1854, and the dead reed is the pull C above middle C on the right hand. All help much appreciated!

But do musical instruments have to 'earn their keep'? It's not an attitude I can really relate to, but I guess I would say that the money I spent on my EC has been paid back several times over by the companionship that comes naturally when you can play music and are in the company of other like-minded people, the entertainingly nerdy conversations that strike up with friends and total strangers about serial numbers and dates and actions and bellows and ..., and above all by the sheer joy of being able to produce (hopefully) beautiful sounds and move people to dance, just by moving your arms in and out and pressing some metal buttons down in a vaguely organised fashion. Given the way the exchange rate is plummeting I spent 1300EU+ on my concertina and I don't regret a single penny of it. And I guess what I've written also answers the original motivation question as well!

I'm one of those fortunate (someone higher up this thread termed it annoying) people who can pick the majority of tunes up pretty quickly - in fact I'm starting to be able to do this *on concertina*, which is the point that I start to think I'm really getting somewhere on an instrument. I've developed a reasonable 'ear' for pitch down the years, but I'm convinced that the real breakthrough for me was learning to play a chord instrument, in my case bouzouki. Suddenly the idea of which chords work with which part of the tune came together in my head, and I started to be able to put (simple) chords to tunes. And blow me down if the same subconscious thought process transferred immediately and wholesale to the flute. I could now very quickly work out the basic structure of a tune in terms of chords, and then half the battle to pick a new tune up was won because the basic shape of the tune was there. I suspect many of those people who can quickly improvise harmonies to tunes they don't previously know are quite often in fact using something like the same technique, and the 'improvised harmony' might actually sometimes be them missing the actual notes of the tune but getting the right chord structure. Also in traditional musicians' favour is the fact that many tunes stay in the same key all the way through; and also once yopu are familiar with the particular style you are playing (I'm good at picking up English and French tunes but rubbish at Scottish tunes, for example) you can begin to 'guess' what's coming next, and if that guess is wrong you've narrowed the options for the next time that bit of the tune comes round. And the *other* thing is to do it sufficiently often that it all just happens - I'm sure that if I was sat in a session and started to analyse what I'm doing the way I have just done in this article, it would fall apart very quickly. Sportsmen talk about muscle memory, and I'm sure the same idea applies to many aspects of musical ability whether it's sight-reading, improvising, or picking tunes up by ear. Sorry, I've rabbited on, here endeth the sermon!

Sorry, got interrupted in mid-message-writing, and by the time I got back several other people had said pretty much the same things.

OK, I give. What's the American translation of "strictly come"? -jim The US version of the show is called is 'Dancing With The Stars' - celebrities get paired with professional ballroom dancers, and one couple gets voted off every week until you get a winner. I'm unashamedly hooked on the UK version. To veer back on topic, the attendance demographic at festival morris workshops shows that there is a huge amount of interest in morris from people in their teens and twenties, and I see little or no danger of it 'dying'. It may mutate and change emphasis and evolve, but that's what living traditions do ... What might well die out is the Morris Ring sides, which is a very different kettle of fish, but is in fact what the original press release that started all this was actually saying. The Morris Ring has a self-appointed role as The Voice Of Proper Morris (my words not theirs), but the other two morris organisations that sides can choose to affiliate to, namely the Morris Federation and Open Morris, are in rude health. The misogynist neanderthal attitude that the Ring embodies, and that the new Squire of the Ring is by all accounts actively trying to re-establish after previous squires had done supposedly terrible things like [gasp] permitting female musicians in emergencies (!), is a sad outdated relic of the attitudes and political views of the people and organisations that lead to the Ring's establishment in the 1930s. If the Morris Ring dies out in the next twenty years, jolly good thing too.

I started EC aged 42, and am running behind the bus as fast as I can: some days the bus gets closer, and some days the bus gets further away, but at least it's still in sight ...

Fair cop; I was, I think, responding more generically to the thought that there might be some league table of instrument speeds, and so missed the point about the responsiveness of the individual instrument.

Two very good points. To answer one of your questions, stiff bellows will affect the volume you can achieve (because they will travel less far in the same amount of time than slack bellows), but the speed of your playing will be determined far more by your fingers than the bellows. There are no faster instruments, just faster players. Savour the tune, don't just try to fly through it as quickly as possible and get on to the next one, which is a habit amongst some (but by no means all) musicians of all standards. Being able to play fast is one skill amongst many that you need to become a decent musician, and is most certainly not to be pursued as an end in its own right! Keep at it ...

Fairly soon after I started playing EC I was lucky enough to be able to get a perfect view of Robert Harbron's right-hand technique all the way through a splendid[*] Dr Faustus concert, and he's another one who blatantly disregards the 'No Pinkie' rule - in fact he seemed to completely disregard any rules whatsoever about which finger plays which row; by the end of the concert I wouldn't have been suprised to see him to take his thumbs out of the straps and start playing chords with them as well. So with all those excellent players showing such a blatant disregard for the 'No Pinkie' rule, it looks like it is one that is great when you're learning, but is there to be broken ... [*] Well it was a splendid gig up until the point they announced they were disbanding and that particular gig was going to be their last one!