Dupont Music Circle

[Roger Hare]

'Discovered' this site t'other day as a result of a conversation with someone else, about something else. 200+ tunes with words, including some 'classic' folk songs. Downloadable ABC code and PDF scores:

 

Dupont Music Circle

 

May be of interest to some?

 

 

Edited June 15 by Roger Hare

[RAc]

Thanks for the pointer, Roger! It is always an inspiration to hear about (and browse) novel music resources.

 

Which leads me to thinking... do we already have a thread that collects those sites in  single place? By now, there are remarkably many of such browsable collection, in particular in the folk dance tune area (eg folktunefinder. abcnotation, thesession, rudemex, English Folk Dance and Song Society - Historical Dance and Tune Books to name only the usual suspects)? If not, would it make sense to open one and add new entries to it as they come in?

 

Possibly @Michael Eskin could also add all of those (at least the ones that contain abcs) to his search engine?

 

 

[Roger Hare]

3 hours ago, RAc said:

Thanks for the pointer, Roger! It is always an inspiration to hear about (and browse) novel music resources.

 

Which leads me to thinking... do we already have a thread that collects those sites in  single place? By now, there are remarkably many of such browsable collection, in particular in the folk dance tune area (eg folktunefinder. abcnotation, thesession, rudemex, English Folk Dance and Song Society - Historical Dance and Tune Books to name only the usual suspects)? If not, would it make sense to open one and add new entries to it as they come in?

 

Possibly @Michael Eskin could also add all of those (at least the ones that contain abcs) to his search engine?

I hope you find a few new tunes - I did...

 

The problem with  a sort of 'global resource' is that every organisation, large or small, adopts its own approach to presenting the music. Some provide ABC, PDF and sound files, some provide only one or two of those. Some provide the music on a tune-at-a-time basis, some in a single humungous file (my preference 🙂). There is so little compatibility between the format/presentation styles of these different organisations that I doubt whether a single resource is practicable. The 'best' you will be able to do is a simple 'list of URLs'. We can all do that by simply bookmarking resources in our browsers as we find them...

 

Me? I always download stuff when I find it, because these sites have a nasty habit of disappearing. If a site presents tunes on a tune-a-time-basis (eg: Rude Mechanicals) I will laboriously create a single ABC file for the whole collection and save it (for the reason I mention above).

 

The most 'consistent' collections (in presentation/stylistic terms) which I can think of at the moment are those to be found on the Village Music Project web site, and even there, there is a significant variability in the coding style adopted by the various volunteer transcribers (of whom I have been one on two or three occasions). I'm currently trying to reduce the whole of the VMP canon into a single (crudely) searchable 'database' and it's a nightmare - but it's working - sort of. I currently have 17000+ tunes in the 'database' I'm creating. It's a single huge ABC file and I search it and extract tunes using a couple of little programs wot I wrote. The point is not that I'm a clever bugger because I can do this, (it's actually relatively simple), but that it's bloody hard work even doing it locally on a restricted set of files in a single format (ABC) which have been re-formatted using a fairly tightly specified coding style. I can't imagine it being practicable to do this remotely on sets of files in a myriad different styles and formats (ABC, MuseScore, lilypond, PDF, MP3, MIDI, xml, and so on and on...).

 

It would be splendid if someone proved me wrong, but I ain't holding my breath...

[Michael Eskin]

6 hours ago, RAc said:

Thanks for the pointer, Roger! It is always an inspiration to hear about (and browse) novel music resources.

 

Which leads me to thinking... do we already have a thread that collects those sites in  single place? By now, there are remarkably many of such browsable collection, in particular in the folk dance tune area (eg folktunefinder. abcnotation, thesession, rudemex, English Folk Dance and Song Society - Historical Dance and Tune Books to name only the usual suspects)? If not, would it make sense to open one and add new entries to it as they come in?

 

Possibly @Michael Eskin could also add all of those (at least the ones that contain abcs) to his search engine?

 

 

Sorry, I have no plans to do that.

 

Certainly one could use the tool to aggregate the available ABCs into an interactive PDF tunebook or website.

[Michael Eskin]

Here you go, took about 10 minutes to build these using my ABC Transcription Tools once I had extracted all the ABCs from the Dupont Music Circle per-song websites using a custom ABC extractor utility I wrote to do the job:

Interactive PDF tunebook:
https://michaeleskin.com/transcriptions/Dupont_Music_Circle_Songs_16Jun2025.pdf

Interactive website version with instrument and tab selectors:
https://michaeleskin.com/tunebook_websites/dupont_music_circle_songs_16jun2025.html
 

 

Note: If you open the PDF in Adobe Acrobat and click on the tune titles, some tunes may not play because the play links are longer than the 2K max that Acrobat can handle as a result of the many verses of text for some tunes.  The tool will notify you in these cases.

Other PDF readers and/or reading the PDF by opening or drag/dropping it on your browser should work fine for all tunes.  The website version has no limits like this.

This is from a raw scrape of the song websites, with some formatting modifications, but I did not play every song, so you may have to make tempo adjustments when playing by clicking the tempo percentage control at the lower right of the Player.

Anyone here involved with the group who can pass this info along to them?

Edited June 16 by Michael Eskin

[Roger Hare]

25 minutes ago, Michael Eskin said:

...Anyone here involved with the group who can pass this info along to them?

Heh! Why am I not in the least surprised that this happened?🙂

 

I'm not aware of any member of the group who is a subscriber to concertina.net, but I already passed the information along to my correspondent who is involved with the group...

Edited June 16 by Roger Hare

[Michael Eskin]

I'm sure the PDF and website are not perfect, but both were easy enough to quickly put together in case anyone might find them useful.

The website version has Concertina and Accordion instruments available (among several others) for the melody along with piano backup.   The PDF uses piano sounds for melody and backup.

Edited June 16 by Michael Eskin

[Michael Eskin]

Updated both to add links back to the original Dupont Music Circle website.

[Michael Eskin]

Added PDF versions that play with Accordion and Concertina sounds:
 

https://michaeleskin.com/tunebooks.html#dupont