Titles For New Tunes

[Mikefule]

How do you come up with titles for new tunes? I have written a few jigs, marches and waltzes over the years. I play some of them regularly. Writing them down today I realised that they have no titles. How on Earth do you come up with a convincing (rather than naff or corny) title for what is essentially "just another jig"? Any suggestions?

[Pete Dunk]

Interesting question on a taxing subject, well it's taxing for me at least. If all else fails try naming the tune after someone or somewhere, Jerry's Jig, The Tunbridge Trot, Millennium March. Name them after animals, The Buzzard would be a good name for a hornpipe, or try nicking weird words from old tune names, The Somerset Maggot, Frankie Boyles Jegg, Theo's Favourite, Billy Pigg's Fancy, The Humours of Acrington, A Trip to Port Sunlight (yuk!). The hardest bit is matching the 'feel' of the name to the 'feel' of the tune. The one name that suggests nothing at all is a number, Alistair Anderson's No.1 could be absolutely anything.

 

Just a few ideas to get you started.

[Lester Bailey]

Mikefule's Number 1

Mikefule's Number 2

Mikefule's Number 3

 

etc etc

 

If it was good enough for Beethoven

[Dirge]

The Buzzard would be a good name for a hornpipe,

How can you say that? Buzzards never do anything so energetic. They just float around looking graceful and impressive.

 

Ever-present (in Somerset) on high, they're like God's watchers of his creation. Hornpipe? Pah!

 

(I have an affection for buzzards)

[JimLucas]

(I have an affection for buzzards)

 

Your screen name would suggest that.

[Geoff Wooff]

If you are inventive enough to compose your own tunes then surely you could come up with some reasonable titles. I feel it is easier than completing the musical creation part..

[Chris Drinkwater]

As someone who has composed a few tunes, as Geoff says, above, the hardest part is writing the tune. For some reason, the titles I have given them, have always come easily to me. Whether or not they suit the tune is another matter but as long as they are original, as far as one can tell, thats all that counts. Examples of tunes I have written and their titles, are a jig I have called Gardener's Delight after my profession, and Angela's Waltz, named after a very good concertina playing friend of mine and written for her birthday, a few years ago. Recently, I wrote a march, which I have named Captain Spauldings, after a character Groucho Marx plays in the film Animal Crackers. It just seemed to suit it.

Edited March 30, 2013 by Chris Drinkwater

[JimLucas]

If you are inventive enough to compose your own tunes then surely you could come up with some reasonable titles. I feel it is easier than completing the musical creation part..

 

For you, maybe, but not necessarily for everyone. You might just as well say, "If you're inventive enough to play anglo, then surely you can play English."

 

Sometimes I find naming a tune easy, other times much harder. But I do have tricks that I can use. E.g.,

• The most common -- and easiest -- is when I've composed a tune specifically to honor a friend. E.g., "Pat's Fancy", "Fantasia Theresia", or simply "Alan Mackall".
• Still honoring friends, I may use something associated with them, rather than their name itself. E.g., "Planxty Bartof", written for the musician owner of Cafe Bartof in Copenhagen, or "Topping Lifts" (lines for adjusting a sail) and "Clear Water", written respectively for two friends closely associated with the sloop "Clearwater". Another time, to name a tune I composed for a friend, I asked her to name one of her favorite things, and so I have "Ripe Brie".
• I've named a few for locations, including a couple after where I was when I composed them. E.g., just noodling on the whistle while walking down the street, I came up with (at different times) "First Avenue" and "Tompkins Square".
• Or the time when I composed them, so I have both "Sunday" and "Bryllupsdag" ("Wedding Day", composed the day the Danish prince was married).
• If no other inspiration strikes, I can just look around me and pick something from the environment. Thus I have a tune named "Asplundh" (the name of an arborist firm, whose truck was in front of my house at the time) and another named "April Snow", while "Green Felt" was composed at the end of an evening of playing pool.
• In my experience, trying to make the name of the tune descriptive of the tune itself is much more difficult, so I only have a few of those, but I did name a tune composed on the whistle that starts with a downward series of rolls, "Jack and Jill".
• My love of wordplay also appears in the name "Gill-O", written for Gill Redmond and her cello.
• Deciding that everyone should have at least one nameless tune, I even named one "Nameless".
• The main thing, though, is to let your imagination run wild (encourage it, if necessary). Unless something strikes you immediately as obviously "right", try many possibilities, many sorts of possibilities, and then pick one. I don't worry too much about getting a name that's "just right". Occasionally I strike such gold, but mostly I'm happy with "good enough", or even "not too bad".
• And since it's your tune, you're also free to change its name at a later time.

[Mikefule]

Thanks. Some good thoughts there.

[Chris Drinkwater]

This discussion gives rise to the inevitable question: what happens to all the tunes, mostly amateur musicians like us, have written over the years? Do any ever get played at sessions to introduce them to a wider audience, and the possibility that other session musicians might like them enough to learn them and pass them on, to the point, in a few years time, when they are such a regular part of the session repertoire that newer musicians perceive them to be "traditional" tunes, rather than tunes that may perhaps have been written more recently in the traditional style. One tune I wrote a couple of years ago, which I called Doreen's Schottische, after my partner, in the style of a Swedish Schottis, upon its introduction at a monthly Scandi session I go to, was immediately liked by all the musicians there, and has now become a standard part of the the reperoire there, which is nice.

 

Chris

[Mikefule]

The greatest compliment would be to turn up and hear a tune being played by someone who didn't know who had written it, and had picked it up from someone else. The tune would then have become part of the tradition.

 

There are websites such as:

 

http://thesession.org/tunes

 

which provide a platform for you to donate your tunes to posterity. Whether anyone spots one among so many is another question.

 

30 years ago I was a regular floor performer (on harmonica) at Nottingham Traditional Music Club (NTMC) and I often played one or two of my own tunes there. There is nothing "special" about them - they are "in the style" and I doubt anyone noticed they were not "traditional" in the modern sense of "historical".

Edited March 31, 2013 by Mikefule

[Anglo-Irishman]

I write mostly songs, so if all else fails, I can use the first line as a title, or the name or trade of the protagonist. But I have composed a few instrumentals (where "composed" = extemporised repeatedly until they gel, and then written down).

One of these is a hornpipe, and it received the title "The Sindelfingen Weaver". Thereby hangs a tale.

I had been back home in Ireland on holiday, and was staying in Donegal. The ladies of the family wanted to have a look at some Donegal tweed, so we visited a hand-weaving factory. It being holiday time, there were only two weavers at work, and we looked over the shoulder of a young blonde weaveress. When my wife made a remark in German, the girl smiled at her. It turned out that she was German, too, and had learned weaving in Sindelfingen, Baden-Württemberg - our nearest larger town! It has a long tradition of weaving, and a school of weaving. After graduating from this, our new acquaintance had been unable to get a job in Germany, so she had emigrated to Donegal, where he not only got a job, but also the prospect of a government subsidy if she decided to become self-employed as a weaver. The hornpipe took shape in our group's practice room in Sindelfingen just after this holiday, so the Irish-German title occurred to me quite spontaneously.

 

A piece that our bass-man composed on the lap dulcimer received the title "Nonameyet", which looks Turkish, although it's English. As someone has pointed out, you can change your own titles at a whim, so when this piece reached concert performance level, it was renamed to "Alles Paletti", which is German for "Everything's OK" - because its first public performance was at our favourite concert venue, Café Paletti.

 

I have an autoharp piece that I call "Devotion" because it's so solemn and, well, devotional. And another, more sprightly one I call "Sligo Rags" (a quote from the comic song "The Irish Rover") because it sounds sort of ragtime-ish, and the composer is Irish.

My most recent instrumental is for the classic banjo. It's been performed several times, but the title hasn't gelled yet. I've been thinking of calling it "Rondo for Classic Banjo", but because it emerged when I was practising an aspect of right-hand technique (a semiquaver run up the first string), I suppose it's really an "Étude". So I could call it "Banjo Étude No. 1". Or even better, "Banjo Étude No. 5", so that people will think I've already composed four other études ...

 

Cheers,

John

[David Barnert]

Here's a thread from [shudder] nine years ago about naming tunes after the names of the notes they start with.

[Ondrej]

Even such a great composer Antonin Dvorak sighed: „Vo muziku by nebylo, ale ty titule ....!“ English loosely translated: "Music would be, but the title ....!"