Scott Joplin Lives!

[Brian Peters]

I've always liked the idea of ragtime on the anglo but I noticed that most of the comments referred to "more than 30 button" boxes.  Can they be played satisfactorily on a 30-b?

 

One possibility is to just play the melody, or the melody and selected harmony notes. This is fine on a 30-button for many ragtime pieces, though some sections may need to be played in a different octave than the piano score indicates. It will sound different without the chords, but not necessarily deficient, since many ragtime melodies are, after all, fine tunes.

 

Then one can add more harmony notes, and occasional chords. The chords needn't be either as constant or as full as the piano arrangement. It's the ragtime "feel" you should want, not a piano imitation. You might be surprised that only a few chords, if judiciously chosen, can give the feeling that it's being played "with chords". Even the signature ragtime syncopation against a steady bass can be "simulated" with a bass that doesn't hit every beat.

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Forgive me for exhuming another dead thread......

 

In answer to the original question, a 30-button anglo should be adequate for a lot of this kind of music, so long as the top row includes accidentals like C#, D#, Bb, etc. But while it's true that the melodies sound OK on their own, and that you could do as others have suggested and play along with a backing musician or two, the real challenge is to do the whole thing (or at least something that sounds like it) on the one concertina. To do that you have to try to (a) approximate the correct chords on the left hand - sometimes a challenge on an anglo where the bellows might be going the wrong way - and ( lay down an ironclad vamping rhythm against which the syncopations of the melody can really stand out. Being primarily a "by ear" player I have to admit I don't learn this stuff from piano music, or bother too much about playing it in the original key.

 

The late Andrew Blakeney-Edwards does a great job with "Maple Leaf" on the Anglo International CD set. Iris Bishop is hot on ragtime too, though of course she plays duet which is cheating.

 

Brian

[stevetwilliams]

Brian is too modest - I've just attended Concertina's at Witney, and Brian performed the Dallas Rag at the Tutor concert. Also see his new CD 'Anglophilia' on Pugwash Music 2005 for his versions of both the Dallas Rag and the Entertainer.

 

Awesome performances that have to be heard to be appreciated !!

 

Apologies if this seems like blatant advertising - I have as they say no commercial interest in Pugwash Music.

 

Steve

[lildogturpy]

This year at the North-East Squeeze in Concert there was a lovely rendition of Scott Joplin's Sycamore Rag by Rachel's concertina/accordion band.

[Brian Peters]

Apologies if this seems like blatant advertising - I have as they say no commercial interest in Pugwash Music. 

 

Steve

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Thanks for the kind words, Steve. He really doesn't have a commercial interest in Pugwash Music, readers, although I do.

 

What I really wanted to say was, I've no idea how the sardonic-looking guy with the shades sneaked into my previous message. I must have dropped off and slumped forward onto the keyboard or something.

Brian

[RatFace]

There are some relatively simple arrangements of rags for guitar that work (ranging from not-very-well to very-well) on English concertina, ideally tenor-treble but a treble if you're adept at adapting. I mean playing tune + self-accompaniment - this kind of stuff is quite good for developing the ability to play more than one "line" at once, because it's not just tune + chords - it's tune + bass + a little bit of harmony, and eventually you get the hang of controlling the phrasing of both lines at once, independantly.

[David Barnert]

What I really wanted to say was, I've no idea how the sardonic-looking guy with the shades sneaked into my previous message.  I must have dropped off and slumped forward onto the keyboard or something.

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You typed just what you thought you typed. The problem is that the "smilies" system will always try to substitute a smiley for certain strings of characters. A colon and a close parenthesis, for instance, comes out like this while a colon and a P comes out like this . You typed a capital B and a close parenthesis, which is the code for the smiley with the shades. You can disable this feature, if you wish, by unchecking "enable emoticons" at the bottom of the text window. You could even edit your previous post at this point and do that (or replace the capital B with a small one to match the "(a)" earlier in your post, since "" does not trigger a smiley.

Edited September 29, 2005 by David Barnert

[JimLucas]

...replace the capital B with a small one to match the "(a)" earlier in your post, since "" does not trigger a smiley.

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Not that simple. No distinction is made between upper and lower case in building smileys, but the interpretation can depend on what comes immediately before. I think that's why the smileys inserted by clicking on the list of smileys all have both leading and trailing blanks.

 

[To see how each of the following is created, click the Reply button for this message, but then when you're done looking at them DO NOT clilck Add Reply, but instead click your browser's Back (left arrow) button. I do not want to see a bunch of copies of my message from people who follow the first part of these instructions, but not the second. ]

 

a) A) B) :D :o "" ""

... but

"(" "("

... also

lamb) DUMB)

... but

lam DUM

... and

list:) and list: ) vs. list

[Brian Peters]

You typed just what you thought you typed. The problem is that the "smilies" system will always try to substitute a smiley for certain strings of characters.

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Thanks David, and also Jim Lucas - a real leap forward in my knowledge. However, rather than master the complexities of the code I suspect best practice may be to disable the little buggers in future. Though I did rather identify with the cool character in the shades.

 

David, I see you're in Albany. Do you ever get to Old Songs? I should be there next June.

Brian

[David Barnert]

Not that simple.

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I stand corrected. I obviously haven't spent as much time poking around this site as the Ineluctable Opinionmaker has.

 

However, Jim, I think you've obscured your point in your first line of examples by typing two capital B's instead of a capital and a small, similarly with the D's and the O's.

[David Barnert]

David, I see you're in Albany.  Do you ever get to Old Songs?  I should be there next June.

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I often miss the event, and have never actually spent more than a day there in any given weekend. That's usually the one weekend in June that I don't have Morris Dancing committments (because guess where all the Morris Dancers are!) and I have other priorities.

[JimLucas]

However, Jim, I think you've obscured your point in your first line of examples by typing two capital B's instead of a capital and a small, similarly with the D's and the O's.

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Actually, no. Your observation helps to make my first point, that the forum software treats upper and lower case identically in []'ed tags. I very carefully entered separate upper and lower case alternatives, but between my clicking Add Reply in input mode and your viewing the display in Reply mode the forum software has converted them to its standard all-upper-case form.

 

My error was in not remembering that it does that, since in the past I've noticed it with things like "

" and "".

 

You can check that by creating (in the Test Forum, please) your own post using lower-case tags and smileys. Look at it once it's posted, and I expect you'll see them all converted to upper case.

 

Edited to add: You might also notice in Brian's original post that his "(a)" is lower case but the "(" which turned into a blind smiley now has an upper-case "B". I suspect that he actually entered a lower-case "b" to match his "a", but the forum software converted it to upper case after it interpreted it as a smiley.

Edited September 29, 2005 by JimLucas

[David Barnert]

Actually, no...

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Yes, that occurred to me shortly after I posted. I just had a chance to get back on and point that out, but you beat me to it.

[Ken_Coles]

David, I see you're in Albany.  Do you ever get to Old Songs?  I should be there next June.

Brian

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That's all I need to know...will add it to my calendar, as I would love to hear Mr. Peters in person. Here's hoping he is invited back to Pinewoods some time as a staff member. Niel Wayne was at Old Songs a year or two ago and I wished I had been there to hear his presentation. Us newbies (only a bit over a decade myself) in the concertina world have catching up to do.

 

Ken

[Henk van Aalten]

I very carefully entered separate upper and lower case alternatives, but between my clicking Add Reply in input mode and your viewing the display in Reply mode the forum software has converted them to its standard all-upper-case form.

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Converting tags to upper-case? Not in my-case

 

Edited September 30, 2005 by Henk van Aalten

[JimLucas]

Converting tags to upper-case? Not in my-case

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Oops!

 

I have now done a more thorough test and analysis, in the Test Forum: here.

 

The results are, as they say, "interesting"!

[Nanette Hooker]

There's a lovely version of Scott Joplin's "Chrysanthemum", played by the the Boris Matusewitch Quartet, on the old Folkways album "The English Concertina", which was compiled by Richard Carlin back in 1976. (It's a fascinating album, if you can find a copy.)

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Check here for cd.