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86 Swiss & German Folksongs for Anglo Concertina


gcoover

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Barbara Steinger, from Akkordeonschule Aarau in Switzerland has just published 86 Swiss & German Folksongs for Anglo Concertina through Rollston Press, available worldwide on the various Amazons.

 

It's in German and Romansh, with English translations of the introductory sections, with Romansh and German lyrics.

 

All songs have QR code links to YouTube videos of Barbara and students from the school playing the tune.

 

Attached is a list of the tunes included, along with a nice easy sample from the book.

 

They actively teach concertina as well as accordion at Akkordeonschule Aarau, and it's been a real pleasure working with them on this book!

 

Gary

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Le-Vieux-Chalet.pdf Swiss-German-songs.pdf

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In all honesty, the tune selection makes my (german) toe nails curl. It's the same dust-covered stereotypical crap they fed me since early childhood almost 60 years ago and made me (and many many others in my generation) turn away from folk and move on to French, American, Irish, English... anything but that.

 

Mind you, it's good music, must be since it has survived centuries. But, no, thanks. There IS a good, meaningful, honest and folkish in the best sense folk tradition in Germany, but I do not see more than a half dozen examples (if at all) of it in that selection.

 

Of course I can not comment about the Swiss selection, the quality of the arrangements and other aspects of the book, but I do not feel any urge to look into that. 

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Due to copyright issues and the difficulty and expense of tracking down permissions, this book, like many others, must rely on the older songs in the public domain. 

 

If you'd like to recommend other German tunes and folksongs, I'll bet they could easily be incorporated into a second book!


Gary

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1 minute ago, gcoover said:

Due to copyright issues and the difficulty and expense of tracking down permissions, this book, like many others, must rely on the older songs in the public domain. 

 

If you'd like to recommend other German tunes and folksongs, I'll bet they could easily be incorporated into a second book!


Gary

 

Sorry, but that sounds like a rather weak excuse. Copyright restrictions have most certainly expired (to my best knowledge) for everything written/transcribed no later than 1900, and there are many examples of fine German folk songs (unrecognized in that and like selections) published well before that time (and reshifted into focus by bands like "Zupfgeigenhansel" as early as in the 1960s). German folk tradition has been revived in what is more generically labelled as "folk revival" in depth, and if you listen to bands like "Deitsch," they have much more to offer than "Ännchen von Tharau," yet few of their repertoire is younger than 150 years. There is more than enough perfectly unrestricted material out there.

   

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30 minutes ago, RAc said:

In all honesty, the tune selection makes my (german) toe nails curl.

I believe you!🙄

The songs that I included in my collection of "Songs for the Thüringer Waldzither" when I was playing regularly for the inmates of a German old folks' home, are all in there! (Except for my favourite: Im schönsten Wiesengrunde.)

My reaction is not as drastic as yours, because I'm an Irishman by birth and upbringing and a German only by naturalisation, and the Irish have a much more relaxed relationship to folk songs (their own and those of others) than Germans do.

In the discussed collection, I do miss the political songs from the 1840s (a collection of Irish songs wouldn't be complete without a rebel song or two).

 

Speaking of politics: to be totally politically correct, the word "Zigeuner" (as in No. 34 of the German songs) is frowned upon nowadays. Just yesterday, we had a memorial gathering in the marketplace of our village to commemorate the 80th anniversary of the deportation of 26 gypsies from here to Auschwitz in 1943. The descendents of the handful of survivors, who still live here, call themselves Sinti - and when you hear citations from the official Nazi regulations on the "solution of the Zigeuner problem", you wouldn't lke to be called a Zigeuner either!

PC or not PC - at the memorial event, we had wonderful music, played by a local Sinti trio, which I have no compunction about calling "gypsy jazz"!

Cheers,

John

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We are very much on the same page here, John! 

 

Even though there are some who would argue that you are more German than most Germans (;-)), I am certain that you and most Irish people would respond similarly when being presented with a collection of "Irish folk songs" that consists solely of "The Wild Rover," "Whiskey in the Jar," "Drunken Sailor" and the other half dozen sanitized destillations of the rich, complex and diverse folk tradition Ireland has to offer. Likewise, Gary would at best be slightly amused about a "Collection of American Folk songs" that would consist exclusively of "The Streets of Laredo," "Blue Moon of Kentucky," "Wildwood Flower" etc.

 

In Germany, the situation is even worse (no thanks as usual to the Horror Clown with the stupid moustache, just to make sure I do not get misunderstood) because as opposed to, say, Ireland, where the political struggles and its history are an integral part of the folk tradition, Germany has a sad long reaching tradition of instrumentalizing and sanitizing folklore - which is the very contradiction of its nature. 

 

The songs of the 1840s (one would be hard pressed to argue with songs from that period in terms of licensing or ownership) that you refer to are a prime example of folk songs that to this very day are swept under the carpet just to present German folk as inoffensive, unpolitical and uncontroversial as possible. Mind you, I am not one of those who believe that folk should always be political or moon howling social injustice, yet THAT tradition is as much part of Germany's folk heritage as every one in the collection, yet somehow, to this very day many "collections of German folk tunes" manage to completly ignore it. No surprise many Germans who like folk music for what folk is all about turn to other culture's folklore, like me.

  

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Well, there is certainly no intention of offending anyone or anyone's musical sensibilities, these tunes were selected by the folks at Akkordeonschule Aarau so perhaps in their part of the world these are the tunes their students are interested in learning.

 

It is in no way meant to be a definitive list of German or Swiss folk tunes! It's just one person's selection and suggestion for learning Anglo. Other people's books might include other tunes and that's perfectly ok.

 

But speaking of cultural minefields, they originally had 88 tunes until someone pointed out that the number 88 can now also refer to HH (since it is the 8th letter of the alphabet), and there are some that say that means "Heil you-know-who." Yikes! 

 

As for my own personal taste in German music, it's hard to beat "Tanzteufel" (Folk Freak FF1010, 1983) by Lilienthal. Hard to find, not to everyone's taste, no concertina whatsoever, but it has some really clever arrangements and nice folkrock. Reminds me a bit of Malicorne, Kadril, and Albion Band. Maybe a book someday of their tunes for concertina and loud electric guitar...

 

Gary

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8 hours ago, gcoover said:

But speaking of cultural minefields, they originally had 88 tunes until someone pointed out that the number 88 can now also refer to HH (since it is the 8th letter of the alphabet), and there are some that say that means "Heil you-know-who." Yikes! 

 

Somebody had to "point this out" to them? EXCUSE ME? Every child in Germany knows about 88, and the number is outlawed in the number part of registration plates in at least 6 federal states along with SS,SA,KZ and a few others in the letter part! Already CONSIDERING a tune count of 88 in a German folk song collection implies at the very best a perfect ignorance of a rather sensitive part of German history!

 

It is not getting any better in favor of those who have put together the collection.  

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Sorry to disappoint, but this book is about Anglo music in Switzerland and not politics in Germany!
 

I hope others can enjoy the book for what it is, just one person’s collection of folk songs they are sharing with the greater concertina community. 
 

Gary

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My goodness....all this prickliness about German folksongs reminds me of how an earnest discussion of blackface minstrelsy would go down here in the US! Clearly the 20th C was a disaster in Germany, when the Nazis of course politicized a lot of folk music for their propaganda uses - thereby poisoning the well - and this complete outsider would guess it will take generations there to get much of the music out from under that. There is a lot of really wonderful and innovative melodic material in the American minstrels, too, but don't expect us to wax rhapsodic about it here anytime soon; it is too painful to contemplate the awful totality of it.

 

So it is only natural, one would think, for a simple collection of German folk songs to reach deep to a time before the 20th C. Reminds me a bit of the longstanding tradition in Texas, where I live, of German beer gardens with oompah bands (Germans fleeing the 1848 war were a big part of the early settlement of Texas). The oompah bands, many of them staffed by local descendants of German pioneers, don't venture at all into modern German politics or rebel songs or anything like that....they just find sweet and bouncy old German melodies and songs and drench them in sentiment and lager. Might make any 'real' German's toes curl, but their long lost cousins in Texas like it just fine. To each his/her own!

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23 hours ago, RAc said:

No surprise many Germans who like folk music for what folk is all about turn to other culture's folklore, like me.

A very good point, Rüdiger!

After 20 years as the frontman of an Irish Folk Group in Germany, I know what you mean.

Cheers,

John

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38 minutes ago, Dan Worrall said:

Might make any 'real' German's toes curl, but their long lost cousins in Texas like it just fine. To each his/her own!

Indeed, to each his/her own!

The "fella with the funny moustache", whom Rüdiger mentioned, is guilty of a lot of things apart from persecuting gypsies, homosexuals, evangelicals and Jews. He also put an end to a fascinating youth movement of the 1920s and early '30s called the "Wandervogel" (Bird of Passage). This was somewhat equivalent to the "Great Folk Scare" of the 1960s in the English-speaking world. Young people bought Waldzithern (a variety of cittern, which for me is the best accompaniment for German folk songs) and guitars, and hiked through the German forests, plunking and singing the old folk songs. The middle-aged populace was annoyed by the "noise", but glad that they soon vanished into the woods and left their parents' generation in peace. We (Germans) would have had a certain degree of continuity in our song tradition, had "The Party" not banned the Wandervogel by integrating it into the Hitler Youth Organisation after 1933.

Even today, in the ranks of the Waldzither players, there are people who try to keep the song tradition of the Wandervogel alive. They are, however, a minority.

 

In short, "folk music" is not a trivial concept in present-day Germany!

Cheers,

John

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Please chill, dudes.

Way off topic.

Interesting rants though I must say; and a lot of stuff I did not know.

Dans' post though shows where this could be headed; blackface, prison songs, slave songs, etc.

Next up: my favorite Randy Newman album "Good Ol Boys". 

 

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